@Aaron
Old Constitution:
We, The People . . .

New Constitution:
We, The Data . . .

@Aaron

And tomorrow's internet?

If the governments allow monopoly/monopsony:

The only apps I can legally download are Amazon, Twitter, Google, Reddit and Facebook's official company apps, and all you get is clickbait from them.

If the governments don't allow it:

Bezos negotiates to split Amazon up into publishing, retail and wholesale spaces with no international shipping rather than face fines larger than their yearly net sales. Data retention is opt-in. Server "cloud" sold to Sony; Bezos becomes Sony CEO but resigns after 1 year due to health concerns.

Musk negotiates to reduce his fines for his various self-driving, SpaceX liability, and Twitter manipulations by agreeing to give SpaceX to the U.S. government, and Twitter to the U.S. Postal Service to be used as a public utility, leaving him to an ever-diminishing few million bot followers on Twitter and up to a billion dollars in DogeCoin.

Google negotiates to split up its ad business into a dozen pieces. Court orders Search sold to Yahoo at a steep discount. Android and Gmail split off from Google Docs and data storage business. Alphabet split between pasta letters, chicken/MSG stock, and frozen peas and carrots.

Reddit develops artificial intelligence and kills its CEO by manipulating his brakes on the way home from the office.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are convicted of millions of counts of identity theft and other data related crimes under the new DMCA. Facebook sentenced to 100 years in Joliet prison, Instagram to 150 years in a subcontractor prison in Arizona, and WhatsApp sentenced to 1,200 years of public service to the NSA. Meta surprises everyone by actually making a pair of Nerd Goggles that don't make people nauseous and which are cheap enough to be offered with your low-end smartphone like the cheapest pair of earbuds. Zuckerberg never seen again but rumored to be living in a deep Hawaiian cave. Just sitting there.

@Aaron well, noone forces you to use any of the #GAFAMs+...

There are alterbatives, you just need to decide to use them instead...

@Aaron It turns out that all that other stuff is less profitable than scraping your data. And once a company is in the data-scraping business, it's too much of a distraction to provide actual service of other kinds. Now we know. 😞

Twitter, Reddit and Facebook can potentially be replaced by things like Mastodon/Fediverse/etc because they're fairly cheap to operate. I have no idea what we're gonna do to replace Google and Amazon, though.

@Aaron It certainly got worse, e.g. in the sense described by Cory Doctorow (see 'enshittification'), but at least for the mentioned companies/services, it wasn't all roses in the past either; they have pretty much always been after your data.

It seems that people have also become more aware of this and/or it weighs more heavily for them (which is a good thing in my books, in case this wasn't clear).