Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us Hardcover – November 5, 2019

Don’t Be Evil is a broad, insightful look at large internet companies' threat to personal rights, democracy, and the political system than previous. It covers more ground and is more readable than “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Zuboff. (Zuboff’s book is well worth reading, more of an academic treatise with opinions/ideology tossed in. Filter the opinions to see there is a complete study of big tech surveillance, with evidence.)“Evil” has enough evidence to support stories within the text, considerable evidence listed in the notes for those who doubt and wish to access it. I have downloaded a couple of citations, look forward to reading.I can’t add much to Athan’s excellent November 18 summary except to note an area for extended consideration, the impact of 5G. I suspect 5G is likely to ramp up surveillance capitalism because of explosion of information and ease of capture (humorous vis a vis Shannon … “creation” of information). Given significant potential benefits of 5G in manufacturing and supply chains, I suspect Google will know more about how things work than companies. Because 5G is highly dependent on (distributed) software, hacking may be a problem (… doubtful robust hardware firewalls with processing power will be employed in the many types of internet connected devices … your appliances may be targets).Re reviewers … From the tone Rana is clearly center left. However, how she sees this politically doesn’t negate her thesis and warnings. Everyone should think deeply about the implications of what has occurred with the rise of the internet data companies, consequences and eventualities for the current direction. The accumulation of economic and political power has reached beyond a tipping point. Being captive - products and services -to a very few companies isn’t much different than being captive to any system. Internet companies now dominate large pieces of the economy with lawmakers/regulators doing nothing except whine … lobbying money.As a curious observer, I like evidence. A recent article on Amazon offers a tidbit. Though Amazon claims it is highly competitive because it receives only a small percent of retail revenue, many interviews among the hundreds of 3d party sellers on the Amazon platform show sellers feel they have no choice … Amazon or no market. For its part Amazon takes a small percent of each sale (same as credit card companies and banks) for no effort expended except allowing a listing, micro incremental capital. In this sense Amazon’s return is likely higher than Visa/MC. Another lookback by Tim Wu noted Google and Facebook have eliminated start up competitors by each buring more than 100 companies, leveraging their financial power/income from running virtual monopolies … money from ad sales based on your data (~$550B global, $330B digital). This doesn’t feel like competitive ‘free market capitalism, questionable whether good for the country. The beat goes on, with fewer choices online and brick and mortar.

Building upon books such as World Without End and Weapons of Math Destruction, Don't Be Evil makes the case that Big Tech is doing more harm than good. Foroohar proves her central thesis in spades. I find it impossible to argue the opposite these days using any reasonable standard. Her thoughts on venture capital, the bias of algorithms, election interference, and other related topics should gave anyone pause.Sure, I'd nitpick with a few of her assertions. For instance, at one point she refers to Uber has profitable when it's lost billions every quarter. Perhaps this was just an oversight. More generally, I also have difficulty putting Netflix in the same bucket as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google when it comes to power. FAANGS might make for a nice acronym but I'd argue that Microsoft exerts far more power than the world's most valuable streaming company.Regardless of my small gripes, this book is spot-on. Foroohar synthesizes the main arguments against the tech titans that have become far too powerful—and I defended them for years. Now more than ever, we need to ask ourselves tough questions about Big Tech's power. Promises that the industry will regulate itself are as laughable as banks making the same claim prior to the financial crisis. Her final chapter is her strongest and it's high time to act now with sensible, bi-partisan legislation and oversight.

This is an important book. Makers and Takers was an important book. Rana writes well. She researches well and presents arguments in ways that require serious consideration - even if they challenge the readers a priori assumptions on socio-political matters.She brings the credibility of her role at the FT to writing a book that, while it may not be fully aligned with a majority of FT readers (I am making an assumption that FT readership screws conservative or libertarian - that may be wrong) nevertheless can not be brushed aside.We do enjoy the convenience that Big Tech brings to our lives. We may need to think a bit harder about the trade-offs.While Rana my not be prepared for this, or inclined to go in this direction, the natural pathway to implementing her suggestions for change is a political one. She should give it some consideration!Congratulations

Professor Zubroff wrote a 600 page academic tome entitled Surveillance Capitalism that has become must reading to those who are concerned with how personal data on the internet is used and abused, but like most academic tomes is almost unintelligible to the average reader. This 200 page book covers much of the same ground but is intelligible and should be read by anyone who is on the internet. It explains how valuable our personal data is and asks whether we shouldn't share the enormous profits that Facebook, etc earn from it.

This is an extremely detailed account of the lengths to which Big Tech is willing to go to maintain control of our lives. Read it and you will be enlightened and better informed. Wake up, people.

There is some nice information and story in the book, but the author tries to make everything Amazon does a problem and that diminishes the power of her argument Is the main problem, the surveillance, the business behavior, the lobbying or.....? Or ,simply the fact that they make a lot of money?

These days, if you are reading a book on AI or platform technologies you need an author who understands how technology has merged with capitalism...that they can no longer be separated...and thus the utopian predictions and expectations for the future are misplaced. This book is an excellent warning not only about the inroads surveillance capitalism has already made, but great insight into the distorted system of values and priorities of those behind platform technologies. I highly recommend this book (and Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"). They tell the truth and don't waste much time insulting the reader by trying to be optimistic!

This is a great introduction - which is not to belittle it - to the issues facing us when it comes to Big Tech and their impacts on societies. It's readable but also has some great depth to the reporting

In depth and impartial analysis of the threat that these big tech are posing before the democracy and society.

. no me esta gustando, muy lento de leer

Interesting read but quite repetitive. Feels a bit ranty in places.

Don’t be fooled by the urbane and level-headed language of Rana Foroohar’s second book, this is a laser-focused polemic against Big Tech that hits the bullseye.For starters, it’s hyper-readable. I downed it in ten hours straight, with two five-minute brakes for airplane coffee. The reason it’s so readable is the author never neglects the actors, who are presented to you in flesh and blood, with a side-serving of light gossip and her own personal experiences. So this is about Larry Page, Sergei Brin and Larry Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick and a sprinkling of Steve Jobs, but, very significantly, also about Robert Bork and Lina Khan.Who’s Lina Khan? Well, yes. “Don’t be Evil” is one of two books that have come out simultaneously from the fertile ground that is Barry Lynn’s Open Market Institute. You might have heard of the mini-scandal that occurred in 2017 when Google as good as ousted Lynn from a supposedly independent, progressive think-tank they fund. He had the good sense to give Foroohar a directorship in his new gig. And, boy, has she delivered. As for 30-yr-old antitrust law superstar Khan, she cut her teeth there under Lynn. Bang!And what does the book have to say about Big Tech, then?First comes the requisite 85-page run through the events that got us here and an attempt to place today’s Big Tech in the context of the 20th (as opposed to the 21st) century. Essentially, in what is the weakest, but also the most gossipy / journalistic / personal part of the book, the author argues that what we have here is a combination of the tech mania that led to the tech bust of 2000, fused with the takeover of the economy by the financial giants, which led to the financial crisis of 2008. It’s alright, but tenuous and perhaps even forgettable and it keeps you from the golden part of the book that follows.Chapter 5 is the story of how the lure of the dollar led to Google losing its innocence and falling from Paradise. And what big tech did about it, when it decided it liked money. Chapter and verse. The patent laws they pushed through so they can eat shallow-pocketed minnows whole, their successful campaign under the Obama administration, under the banner that “information wants to be free,” but also the 1998 Clinton law they lucked into, that exempts them from having to police their content. Read it and weep.Chapter 6 argues, extremely persuasively, that big tech has embraced academic psychological research and weaponized its main relevant conclusion (the mice must be rewarded in a random fashion if they are to tug on the lever all the time) to install a “slot machine” in everybody’s pocket, now we all carry our lives on our smartphones. The argument is made that the addiction to “likes” and messages we’ve been expecting is, physiologically even, no different from addiction to cocaine and that Big Tech knows this and explicitly exploits it (with internal emails at shops like Facebook et al. provided as the proof.)Chapter 7 explains how the Network Effect works, creating natural monopolies. The author does not want to lose the reader, she does not launch into a diatribe on how natural monopolies are best run (or at the very least, strictly regulated) by the state; she does one better: she convinces you they are dangerous without even appealing to the economics.Chapter 8 explains, for those who’ve been on planet Zog, that gig work is crap work, leads to massive income disparities between its foot soldiers and its generals and is coming to a theatre near you. For now taxi drivers and journalists, next radiologists and then whatever you’re doing, and it won’t be fun.Chapter 9 is a not-so-impressive, it must be said (but hey, grab Tim Wu’s book if you care so much) primer on what the Chicago school did to antitrust law (it moved it from “monopolies are bad, period” to “monopolies are bad only if they leave the consumer worse off”) and attempts to attack it from two utilitarian, as opposed to political, angles:1. These days you should not measure the effects in dollars, because it is your data rather than your dollars that monopolies covet and they have done a very good job at obfuscating what it’s worth.2. These behemoths are too big for their own bosses to understand, what with Amazon running a publisher, a bookstore, a competitor to FedEx, a cloud computing facility etc. etc. and they have become exactly like the banks that failed: too big to fail, too complex to understand and too big to regulate.Chapter 10 is the most devastating: it reminded me of Uwe Reinhardt’s book about healthcare in America, which argued that while in principle the government ought to be running healthcare, in practice the government is bought-and-paid-for by corporate interests in today’s America, so the idea is not practicable. Here, Rana Faroohar details how deeply Google and Amazon and co. have managed to embed themselves in the legislative process by throwing millions and millions at everything government-related that moves. The chapter is called “In the Swamp.” In the swamp, indeed. Yuck.Chapter 11 is about how Big Tech defends the advertiser’s right to spread lies. It does not much add to what was discussed earlier, I think it’s there so Democrats can read it and feel less bad about having fielded Hillary and then recommend the book to their friends…Chapter 12, about China, makes two points. First it explains that Big Tech is no different from Old Media czar Rupert (he does not get mentioned by name) Murdoch: it’s happy to look the other way in China, because it’s such a big market. Next it builds up the argument what I consider to be THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT THIS BOOK MAKES, to wit:Acemoglu and Robinson argue, very convincingly, that China is not a free country. And because the most important ingredient for growth is the ability to think freely, to experiment and to make mistakes, China’s probably already (pun not intended) hit a wall: its creatives, who do not want to live under constant surveillance, will flee to the West.However, Big Tech now has gotten so monopolistic here in the West, Foroohar argues, that it also stifles growth. Every competitor that gets bought out, lest it grows to challenge the incumbents, every patent that gets infringed, every view that gets silenced gets in the way of the process that makes us the fierce competitors that we are and makes us more vulnerable to our competitors.Wow! Worth the purchase price and the petty talk about her poor parenting, I’d say.A full chapter follows, with ideas about what to do next. They’re all brilliant. Buy the book and read them!