I miss the old Ma Bell. Its monopoly meant that AT&T Bell Labs had no financial pressure which allowed it to pursue pure research and crazy ideas that won several Nobel Prizes and laid the foundation of the 21st century.
It's impossible to say what would've been. Would it really have been worse than the miserable choices of telcos in their current form? Verizon, AT&T, etc.
Similarly, Google's ad revenue allows it to pursue incredible advances in AI and driverless cars that would otherwise be unprofitable.
yet at the same time, they can decide what's "in" and what's "out" (figurately) overnight. They could declare that driverless cars "are not worth it" or that AI research "has to be reorganized", and who would be there to counter them?
Nowadays advertising mainly tries to sell things that people don't need. They can't use these like Farmer Joe to produce new value. Instead it harms the economy when people buy them.
There is of course something to be said about having luxury goods available as reward for people that do well economically, but it should not be the case that the poorest families feel like they need to buy overpriced Adidas shoes to be accepted in society.
It's nowadays central to advertising to build a brand image, to convey a feeling, to always play the same jingle. Which is psychological warfare, it carries essentially no informational value.
> Nowadays advertising mainly tries to sell things that people don't need. (...)
Free market fundamentalists (I'm not one of them) would tell you that no one can judge better than the individual themselves what they need or don't need, and that if an individual says they're willing to part with their money to buy X, then that's them saying they actually need it.
Even though I don't buy this view because the world is more complicated than the binary cause-attribution that it implies, I do think it brings up the question of who decides who needs what. If I believe Axe deodorant will get me "the hottest babes" and I decide really need it, would you have the government override my decision?
