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Monopoly corporations like Google getting away with anything

One of the unfortunate side-effects of huge megacorporations that effectively have a monopoly status is that they can get away with pretty much anything (as long as it's not outright illegal), no matter how much their customers and users may protest.

For example, some time ago Google announced their "YouTube Heroes" program, which would allow certain users (who are not employees of google, but just private citizens) to, among other things, mass-flag videos.

I think the YouTube's advertisement video for this broke some kind of record by having almost a million dislikes, and something like a 99% dislike-to-like ratio. It caused a controversy storm, and hundreds of critical videos. (The original video has comments disabled, which is quite telling. They probably got tired of all the criticism and attacks.)

So, what happened? Google just ignored all the negative feedback and went ahead with the project anyway.

And do you know what's scarier? People just stopped talking about it eventually. Almost nobody even remembers that anymore, much less talks about it. In other words, people, even the harshest of critics, effectively became complacent, and Google got away with it. The only thing Google had to do was to simply ignore their users and their complaints.

More recently Google announced that they would start putting "offensive" videos in a restricted mode, where these videos will exist, but will be effectively invisible. They will not appear in any lists or search results, and the video itself will hide everything, including the author. Comments will be disabled. The only way to see the video is if you have a direct link to it.

Again this caused a shitstorm, and an enormous amount of criticism. And once again Google simply ignored the criticism and went and implemented in anyways. And once again people simply stopped talking about it, and thus became effectively complacent, and thus Google got away with it.

Of course Google isn't the only corporation doing things like this. Whenever a huge megacorporation has an effective monopoly status, they can get away with basically anything (that's not outright illegal). Microsoft gets away with it all the time, especially with Windows. Big social media websites like Facebook get away with it all the time. Valve gets away with it with anything related to Steam. The list goes on.

The scary thing is, as commented, that people complain about it for a while, but then they just become effectively complacent, allowing the corporation to get away with it. The only thing that the corporation needs to do in order to achieve this is to simply ignore the complaints.

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