Supporting material for #Obamanet and Obama’s Selection of Big Tech Winners on Substack.
A retail ISP subscriber pays the ISP monthly fees, the ISP pays its costs and the cost of bandwidth to the upstream network owner. The largest networks peer with each other free of charge, making up the Internet backbone. Total ISP fees, including fixed and mobile, were about $140B annually in 2014, and have been growing since
The following quotes from a book by Christopher Wylie, who worked for Cambridge Analytica, one of many companies buying raw consumer’s data from Facebook. Later, he colluded with Fusion GPS and Chris Steele. These quotes demonstrate importance of the big tech social media platforms in the lives of many people, especially those below age 40.
“When Facebook banned me, they did not simply deactivate my account; they erased my entire presence on Facebook and Instagram. When my friends tried to look up old messages I had sent, nothing came up: My name, my words— everything—had disappeared. I became a shadow.” (p. 237)
“… only when I was erased from Facebook that I truly realized how frequently my life touched their platform. Several of my phone’s apps stopped working—a dating app, a taxi app, a messaging app—because they used Facebook authentication. Subscriptions and accounts I had on websites failed for the same reason. People often talk about a dualism: the cyber world and our “real lives.” But after having most of my digital identity confiscated, I can tell you they are not separate. When you are erased from social media, you lose touch with people. I stopped getting invited to parties—not intentionally, but because those invites always happened on Facebook or were posted on Instagram. Friends who did not have my new phone number found it nearly impossible to get hold of me, except by trying to send an email to my lawyers.” (p. 224)
Wylie, Christopher. Mindf*ck. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition