Rather than some sort of intentional cyberpunk dystopia I think in part what we are seeing is some pressure by American tech companies to emulate Chinese tech c

Rather than some sort of intentional cyberpunk dystopia I think in part what we are seeing is some pressure by American tech companies to emulate Chinese tech companies such as Tencent. One app to rule them all, perhaps would make a good catch phrase. Some of it is a mix of offense and defense, just trying to copy each other and expecting zero margin while preventing a loss in market share. The national law avoidance, tax avoidance, are both being dealt with by EU. Google is being incredibly cagey about how much of a material impact this is going to have on their business. I don't believe they are complying with GDPR, among other things. Google / Alphabet has basically handcuffed themselves and thrown out the keys in the EU vivisection room. If you examine Google / Alphabet's position in the US, they went from being the most frequent visitor of the Obama White House (something like weekly visits) to be vilified by the far right, the far left, and the center. The customers that still trust Google have been left largely in the dark and don't read the news. I've been negative on Google for about a decade now, arriving to the party far in advance of everyone else. I saw the tricks they were pulling back then when they were celebrated. Yesterday's story about Google working with Ascension was extraordinarily shocking. There are, of course, serious privacy issues, and that dominated the headlines. What is truly appalling is that Google is using their artificial intelligence / machine learning work to help a major healthcare company "extract more revenue from patients" (WSJ.) Google has veered so far off course, one wonders if Larry Page and Sergey Brin may be suffering from head injuries or dementia, or just drowned themselves in their own hubris. It starts to sound a lot like OpenAI, where there tech firms believe they are going to do something so substantial, are execute above and beyond what anyone else is capable of, that the entire world is there's for the taking. It is more likely that these companies will cease to exist, by a wide margin. With or without regulators. The more pots they stick their hands in, the less consumers will trust them. We already see it here on hn, people no longer bother to try new Google products because we don't believe those products will still be around in a few years. What happens when the early adapters reject your products?