theseatoms

Have they learned nothing from the past four years? Just that they can get away with it?

If I had to guess, it's less so "planned" and more so that the various institutional and regulatory incentives make this sort of outcome extremely likely.

Sort of like what's about to happen to housing prices, maybe.

Just wait until Uncle Sam foots the bill directly.

He has quite the "ability to pay".

JRE is breadth first search, within a certain...domain.

Pretty sure cable news is legally designated as "entertainment".

Payments can be reduced to packets, for one.

The open protocol could start small and gradually grow over time, maintaining backwards compatibility.

The incentives aren't there, of course.

They can sell their shares.

Taleb's forte is applying various insights from practitioners of financial options to other domains.

Imagine how powerful a paid browser could become on this front. As people slowly become more privacy-aware this might be feasible.

At that point the pollsters may as well conduct a public service announcement. "Be aware that Google tracks and stores basically everything that they can. By the way, did you know this?"

> There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments.

Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.

That "independence" is a fast-dissolving illusion.