What drivel is this?

Everyone loves to hate on the tech giants these days. The unthinking establishment view is that they’re ripping us all off. Thus we have Oliver Kamm, the epitome of that unthinking and establishment view telling us that:

They do not work in consumers’ interests. They give capitalism a bad name.

Let us take just the one example, that of Facebook. Which, through various services like Messenger, WhatsApp and so on allows people to make voice and often enough video calls at no direct cost. Lots of people use these services.

Now perhaps it might be simply our advanced maturity in years but we do actually recall when long distance phone calls were something thought seriously about. They were expensive. International calls doubly so, one did not call up another country simply for a chat. We are also aware that it was only a couple of decades back that it was physically impossible to call much of the world as they simply didn’t have the lines, phones nor connectivity for us to do so.

Now some two to two and a half billion people gain some to all of their telecoms needs, through Facebook, for free.

OK, yes, there are those phone calls which it is not in the caller’s interest to make, often involving late nights and substantial beer, but as a general rule something that used to be too expensive to do casually, that often wasn’t even physically possible, is now to cheap to meter and offered to the consumer for free this is in said consumers’ interests.

It is simply drivel to even wave around the idea that the tech giants are not operating in consumers’ interests. What the heck would be doing that, only if the free telecoms came with a back rub?

We do agree that the world is, as yet, imperfect, even that sometimes government action can and should be taken to getting it closer to the desired state. But we do have to at least start from a valid analysis of the current reality. Something not greatly in evidence in this case of the tech giants,