Amazon stew and editorial content

There is a certain convergence of complex signals that are gathering on the large technology companies. It is widely known that the G7 finance ministers, meeting a few days ago at Lancaster House in London, have opened the door to a project to reform world taxation that should lead to a tax of at least 15% on the profits of multinationals, applied in countries where these benefits are realized so that large corporations can no longer as easily shift their earnings to low-tax countries as they do now. But that’s not the only operation taking place right now. Pending the interventions of the US government, on the impulse of President Biden, around financial revenues and regulations on cryptocurrencies and digital assets, the legislators of the House have proposed a series of bipartisan laws to rein in the largest technology companies in the country including a bill that seeks to split Amazon and other large companies into two or eliminate their private label products. The bills, announced on Friday, represent the largest congressional broadside to a handful of tech companies, including Google, Apple, and Alphabet’s Facebook, whose size and power have attracted growing scrutiny from regulators, both in the United States as much as in Europe. One of the proposed measures, entitled Ending Platform Monopolies Act, aims to require the structural separation of large tech companies, making it illegal for an online platform to own or control products sold on the same platform, in the name of conflict of interest. The risk is that of having to separate your activities in two different sites, one for your own products and the other for those of third parties. A big problem for a company like Amazon that has invested heavily in the proven label, generating over 150 thousand products. Generally speaking, the bills under discussion concern giants with a market capitalization of at least $ 600 billion, more than 50 million monthly active users or 100,000 monthly business users. their contribution to innovation and economic growth, large Chinese Internet companies have long been under increasingly tight control by regulatory authorities who have punctually intervened by sanctioning anti-monopoly practices and data privacy treatment. Xi Jinping shortly after coming to power in late 2012, made his first corporate exit as head of the Chinese Communist Party at technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. The interest of that particular moment was directed above all to the collection of personal data produced by the technological companies which, more than eight years later, are now proving to be a central node of the debate in the country. The government is in fact urging big tech companies like Tencent, online retail giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and the owner of TikTok ByteDance Ltd. to hand over the data they catch from social media, ecommerce and other businesses. example in Australia, attention is at its peak. In February, Parliament passed a law requiring Facebook and others to pay for editorial content. The new code for digital news in fact requires the giants of the web to negotiate with publishers the remuneration of the contents that are published on digital platforms. Treasury Minister Josh Frydenberg explained: “The Code will ensure that the information industry is adequately remunerated for the content generated, helping to support public interest journalism in Australia.”