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Author’s  Note

I receive numerous questions from readers about our economic situation and the condition of civil liberty.

There is no way I can answer so many inquiries, and no need. I have written two books that provide the answers, and they are inexpensive. I have done my job. It is up to you to inform yourself. Kindle Reader software is available as a free online download that permits you to read ebooks in your own web browser.

My latest, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution of the West , is available as an ebook in English as of March 2013 from Amazon.com and from Barnes&Noble.

My book is endorsed by Michael Hudson and Nomi Prims and has a 5 star rating from Amazon reviewers (as of March 23, 2013). Pam Martens’ review at Wall Street On Parade is available here

Libertarians who have not read the book have had an ideological knee-jerk reaction to the title. They demand to know how can I call the present system of crony capitalism laissez faire. I don’t. The current system of government supported crony capitalism is the end result of a 25-year process of deregulation.

Deregulation did not produce libertarian nirvana. It produced economic concentration and crony capitalism.

Amazon provides as a free read the introduction by Johannes Maruschzik to the German edition. Below is my Introduction to my book.

Paul Craig Roberts, March 27, 2012

Not only has your economy been stolen from you but also your civil liberties. My coauthor Lawrence Stratton and I provide the scary details of the entire story in The Tyranny of Good Intentions ^[5]. In the US law is no longer a shield of the people against arbitrary government. Instead, law has been transformed into a weapon in the hands of the government.

Josie Appleton documents that in England also law has been turned into a weapon against the people. http://www.spiked-online.com/site/printable/13420/ ^[6] Anglo-American law, the foundation of liberty and one of the greatest human achievements, lies in ruins.

Libertarians think that liberty is a natural right, and some Christians think that it is a God-given right. In fact, liberty is a human achievement, fought for by Englishmen over the centuries. In the late 17th century, the achievement of the Glorious Revolution was to hold the British government accountable to law. William Blackstone heralded the achievement in his famous Commentaries On The Laws Of England, a bestseller in pre-revolutionary America and the foundation of the US Constitution.

In the late 20th century and early 21st century, governments in the US and Great Britain chafed under the requirement that government, like the people, is ruled by law and took steps to free government from accountability to law.

Appleton says that the result is a “tectonic shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen.” Citizens of the US and UK are once again without the protection of law and subject to arbitrary arrests and indictments or to indefinite detention in the absence of indictments.

In the US, citizens can be detained indefinitely and even executed without due process of law. There is no basis in the US Constitution for these asserted powers. The unconstitutional powers exist only because Congress, the judiciary and the American people have accepted the lie that the loss of civil liberty is the price paid for protection against terrorists.

In a very short time the raw power of the state has been resurrected. Most Americans are oblivious to this outcome. As long as government is imprisoning and killing without trials demonized individuals whom Americans have been propagandized to fear, Americans approve. Americans do not understand that a point is reached when demonization becomes unnecessary and that precedents have been established that revoke the Bill of Rights.

If you are educated by these two books, you will be better able to understand what is happening and, thus, you will be in a better position to survive what is coming.

Introduction to The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic
Dissolution of the West: Towards a New Economics for a Full World

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of the high speed Internet have proved to be the economic and political undoing of the West. “The End Of History” caused socialist India and communist China to join the winning side and to open their economies and underutilized labor forces to Western capital and technology. Pushed by Wall Street and large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, American corporations began offshoring the production of goods and services for their domestic markets. Americans ceased to be employed in the manufacture of goods that they consume as corporate executives maximized shareholder earnings and their performance bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for American labor. Many American professional occupations, such as software engineering and Information Technology, also declined as corporations moved this work abroad and brought in foreigners at lower renumeration for many of the jobs that remained domestically. Design and research jobs followed manufacturing abroad, and employment in middle class professional occupations ceased to grow. By taking the lead in offshoring production for domestic markets, US corporations force the same practice on Europe. The demise of First World employment and of Third World agricultural communities, which are supplanted by large scale monoculture, is known as Globalism.

For most Americans income has stagnated and declined for the past two decades. Much of what Americans lost in wages and salaries as their jobs were moved offshore came back to shareholders and executives in the form of capital gains and performance bonuses from the higher profits that flowed from lower foreign labor costs. The distribution of income worsened dramatically with the mega-rich capturing the gains, while the middle class ladders of upward mobility were dismantled. University graduates unable to find employment returned to live with their parents.

The absence of growth in real consumer incomes resulted in the Federal Reserve expanding credit in order to keep consumer demand growing. The growth of consumer debt was substituted for the missing growth in consumer income. The Federal Reserve’s policy of extremely low interest rates fueled a real estate boom. Housing prices rose dramatically, permitting homeowners to monetize the rising equity in their homes by refinancing their mortgages.

Consumers kept the economy alive by assuming larger mortgages and spending the equity in their homes and by accumulating large credit card balances. The explosion of debt was securitized, given fraudulent investment grade ratings, and sold to unsuspecting investors at home and abroad.

Financial deregulation, which began in the Clinton years and leaped forward in the George W. Bush regime, unleashed greed and debt leverage. Brooksley Born, head of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was prevented from regulating over-the-counter derivatives by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The financial stability of the world was sacrificed to the ideology of these three stooges that “markets are self-regulating.” Insurance companies sold credit default swaps against junk financial instruments without establishing reserves, and financial institutions leveraged every dollar of equity with $30 dollars of debt.

When the bubble burst, the former bankers running the US Treasury provided massive bailouts at taxpayer expense for the irresponsible gambles made by banks that they formerly headed. The Federal Reserve joined the rescue operation. An audit of the Federal Reserve released in July, 2011, revealed that the Federal Reserve had provided $16 trillion–a sum larger than US GDP or the US public debt–in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks, while doing nothing to aid the millions of American families being foreclosed out of their homes. Political accountability disappeared as all public assistance was directed to the mega-rich, whose greed had produced the financial crisis.

The financial crisis and plight of the banksters took center stage and prevented recognition that the crisis sprang not only from the financial deregulation but also from the expansion of debt that was used to substitute for the lack of growth in consumer income. As more and more jobs were offshored, Americans were deprived of incomes from employment. To maintain their consumption, Americans went deeper into debt.

The fact that millions of jobs have been moved offshore is the reason why the most expansionary monetary and fiscal policies in US history have had no success in reducing the unemployment rate. In post-World War II 20th century recessions, laid-off workers were called back to work as expansionary monetary and fiscal policies stimulated consumer demand. However, 21st century unemployment is different. The jobs have been moved abroad and no longer exist. Therefore, workers cannot be called back to factories and to professional service jobs that have been moved abroad.

Economists have failed to recognize the threat that jobs offshoring poses to economies and to economic theory itself, because economists confuse offshoring with free trade, which they believe is mutually beneficial. I will show that offshoring is the antithesis of free trade and that the doctrine of free trade itself is found to be incorrect by the latest work in trade theory. Indeed, as we reach toward a new economics, cherished assumptions and comforting theoretical conclusions will be shown to be erroneous.

This book is organized into three sections. The first section explains successes and failures of economic theory and the erosion of the efficacy of economic policy by globalism. Globalism and financial concentration have destroyed the justifications of market capitalism. Corporations that have become “too big to fail” are sustained by public subsidies, thus destroying capitalism’s claim to be an efficient allocator of resources. Profits no longer are a measure of social welfare when they are obtained by creating unemployment and declining living standards in the home country.

The second section documents how jobs offshoring or globalism and financial deregulation wrecked the US economy, producing high rates of unemployment, poverty and a distribution of income and wealth extremely skewed toward a tiny minority at the top. These severe problems cannot be corrected within a system of globalism.

The third section addresses the European debt crisis and how it is being used both to subvert national sovereignty and to protect bankers from losses by imposing austerity and bailout costs on citizens of the member countries of the European Union.

I will suggest that it is in Germany’s interest to leave the EU, revive the mark, and enter into an economic partnership with Russia. German industry, technology, and economic and financial rectitude, combined with Russian energy and raw materials, would pull all of Eastern Europe into a new economic union, with each country retaining its own currency and budgetary and tax authority. This would break up NATO, which has become an instrument for world oppression and is forcing Europeans to assume burdens of the American Empire.

Sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, twenty-two years after the reunification of Germany, and twenty-one years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany is still occupied by US troops. Do Europeans desire a future as puppet states of a collapsing empire, or do they desire a more promising future of their own?

Published time: March 08, 2013 12:47

New Google Glass app InSight takes the experience of spotting your friends to the next level, as it recognizes your peers by their clothes and accessories – matching specific color patterns and textures to the user.

This new human recognition software makes it impossible to lose your friends in a packed place, such as an airport, concert hall or shopping center.

The app creates a ‘fashion fingerprint’ for every friend based on the outfit they are wearing including clothes, jewelry, glasses, etc.

‘Fashion fingerprint’ is generated by snapping pictures of the user and creating a file of that image called a ‘spatiogram’, which calculates patterns and spatial distribution of colors on the user and analyzes the information to identify that particular person later on in the distance or from a different angle. 

The new system is being partly funded by Google and was presented at the HotMobile technology conference last week, while currently still being developed by the Duke University in North Carolina.

So far the app has been tested by 15 volunteers and managed to identify people correctly 93 per cent of the time.

The software does not use facial recognition systems to locate individuals since it is unlikely that the users will be looking straight into the Google Glass’ camera, InSight developer Srihari Nelakuditi told New Scientist.

He also noted that the ‘fashion fingerprint’ lasts only as long as the user does not change clothes. Afterwards, a new snapshot must be made and a new ‘fingerprint’ created. Thus, for privacy protection, all the user has to do is change outfits, argues Nelakuditi.

Google Glass is a new wearable computer with a head-mounted display. It displays information in a smartphone-like format hands-free and can interact with the internet via natural language voice commands.

The new product does raise new privacy issues, especially considering that users will be able to video record everything through Google Glass without being noticed by others.

Australian Senator Cory Bernardi believes that Google Glass will be “the end of privacy as we know it” because the device can be used for massive surveillance, The Register quoted him as saying.

“A single Google Glass wearer in your favorite restaurant could capture your image and your conversation without you ever knowing,” argues Bernardi. “The footage would be stored on the Google servers, your voice could be translated into text and with the use of facial recognition, could be actually matched to your Google profile.”

Google also has been facing a row of privacy battles in EU and US for its current products.

Just last month European data protection agencies said they intend to crack down on the US internet giant Google before summer after it allegedly failed to follow their orders to comply with EU privacy laws.

Previously, the data protection agencies warned Google that its new confidentiality policy was not in line with EU laws. The regulators included a list of 12 "practical recommendations" which would bring Google’s privacy policy and data collection up to standard. The advisory centers on the firm’s automatic collection of personal data, ranging from browsing histories, to real-time location, to credit card details.

Since January, Google has also been embroiled in its biggest privacy battle yet in the UK over reportedly tracking users’ online habits. At least 10 UK citizens began legal action with dozens more lining up. According to media estimates up to 10 million Britons could join in.

Google is accused of evading security settings on Apple’s devices and Safari’s web browser in order to keep tabs on people’s online preferences.

Was 2012 the Best Year for Documentaries?

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Iranian online video game Asmandez II (Sky Fortress II) has won at the German Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO) 2013 contest.

Asmandez II beat out four other competitors and picked up the Best Indie Game Award of the eighth edition of the contest.

Asmandez II is a browser-based science-fiction strategy MMOG in space opera genre. The game uses the latest web technologies of HTML5 and CSS3 and can be played in both English and Persian languages.

The online strategy game Asmandez II is sequel of the Iranian first online video game Asmandez I that was released in July, 2010, and quickly gathered over 100 000 online users.

Both versions of Asmandez are set in future when inhabitants of the Solar System are engaged in a war with robots and try to go to another system called Limbas.

The sequel which has been made with more advanced narrative strategies and high artistic techniques is available for playing on phone, tablet, or PC.

Produced by Iran's National Foundation for Computer Games, Asmandez II is capable of supporting over 5,000 users at the same time.

The science fiction games were developed by a group of young Iranian experts in an effort to promote computer science in the country.

Iran had earlier released its first three-dimensional video game titled the Age of Heroes in 2009, which was designed based on the stories narrated in the Persian epic poet Ferdowsi's magnum opus, The Shahnameh.

“Some 10 million people use computer games in Iran, only 100 of which can design and develop video games,” Head of Iran's National Foundation for Computer Games Behrouz Minaie had earlier said.

A Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO or MMOG) is a multiplayer video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously on the Internet.

FGP/FGP

RIA Novosti / Mikhail Fomichev

Russia’s Yandex search engine has pushed Microsoft’s Bing aside in global search statistics, climbing to fourth place after Google, Baidu and Yahoo!

­The world-wide search statistics are compiled by comScore’s qsearch.

The trend started November, Yandex representative Tatyana Komarova told Vedomosti daily. Then Yandex processed 4.62 billion search requests compared to Microsoft’s 4.48 billion requests that meant each had roughly a 2.6 percent share. In December the trend continued, as Yandex handled 4.84 billion requests (2.8 percent share) and Microsoft 4.48 billion (2.5 percent share). In the number of unique searchers the companies change places – in December with Microsoft having 268.6 million, and Yandex just 74.4 million.

The growth in searches through Yandex happened because of increase of Russian internet use, according to Komarova. The Russian segment grew 17% in 2012 up to 42.2 million users.

Even through it improved its performance worldwide Moscow-based Yandex NV (YNDX) is a long way behind Google, which retains its position of the world’s search leader. Google handled 114.73 billion requests in December for a 65.2 percent market share. China’s Baidu came next with 14.5 billion (8.2 percent), followed by Yahoo with 8.63 billion (4.9 percent).

However, while Google dominates American and European markets – over 65 percent of American searches and over 90 percent of European searches are made with the Google; in Russia it gives ground to Yandex. In Russia, Yahoo accounts for twice as many searches as Google, having 60.5 percent of Russia’s web-search market compared to 26.4 percent for Google. Like Google Yandex’s core business is in search and also has innovative projects from data and mobile to mapping.

Yandex has become the first Russian company to get access to the vast database of the CERN nuclear research establishment in Switzerland. Last fall Yandex rolled out its own web browser and Android app store in Russia, hoping to expand them worldwide. Yandex also developed a voice-activated visual search engine for Facebook called Wonder, which lets people find local businesses friends had visited or taken photos at, what music they’d been listening to, and what news they had been reading. However, Facebook had to cut its data access (along with Twitter’s Vine app, among others) due to its data policy.

Taking advantage of Russia’s rapidly growing internet market, Yandex has opened up in Turkey. The company says it hopes to raise its market share to 35 percent in five years from 1.4 percent today.  Google has 93.7 percent market share in Turkey according to ComScore. “The target looks ambitious,” Aleksandr Vengranovich, an analyst at Otkritie Capital in Moscow, told Bloomberg. He noted that it took Google about five years to reach 26 percent in Russia, with most of its gains coming from Yandex. 

Yandex says it chose Turkey because of its population of 75 million, and an increasing online audience, Bloomberg reports. The country is now the No. 6 web search market. In November, Yandex became the default search on handsets running the Windows Phone operating system in Turkey, even though Microsoft’s Bing search engine is available. In Turkey, Yandex also developed technology for street-view maps that blurs the face of Kemal Ataturk statues and street portraits to comply with a ban on photographing images of the country’s founder.

AFP Photo / Lionel Bonaventure

Twitter has become the latest target of a sophisticated cyber attack, with around 250,000 accounts exposed. The breach appears to be the latest in a string of attacks on news content sites that’s being blamed on Chinese hackers.

­In its blog, Twitter has announced that it has detected “unusual access” patterns to user’s data and one live attack, which the company has successfully disabled. However, the company states that quarter of a million users have had their information hacked.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked,” statement explained.

As a precautionary security measure, Twitter has reset passwords and revoked session tokens for those accounts it believes were compromised. The company also warns of increased cyber-attack activity throughout the internet and encourages strengthening one’s account passwords.

The social media giant, which arguably revolutionized the news world with immediate access to information, concurs with the recent US Department of Homeland Security warning to disable Java on internet browsers. The company is also “helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”

Twitter fell short of accusing anyone of the attack, but indirectly indicated that it followed a pattern previously reported by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

On Wednesday, the NYT have announced that passwords and accounts of their staff have been infiltrated for four months by hackers from China.

The timing of the attacks coincided with an investigative report into the wealth of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister. 

The Times hired an expert to determine the source of the attack who concluded that “the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.”

China’s Ministry of National Defense responded to the accusations “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless,” NYT quotes.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal made similar accusations, “Chinese hackers believed to have government links have been conducting wide-ranging electronic surveillance of media companies including The Wall Street Journal.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei was quoted by the WSJ as saying “Cyber-attacks are transnational and anonymous. It's very hard to track the source of attack,” he said. “To presume the source of a hacking attack based on speculation is irresponsible and unprofessional.” He added that “Chinese authorities make serious efforts in fighting cyber-attacks.”

Also on Thursday, Bloomberg announced that unsuccessful attempts had been made to access its system.

January 22, 2013  |  

Looking for further proof of the  damaging effects of porn? Lucky for you, the pre-eminent scientific journal Cosmopolitan magazine has weighed in with a survey purporting to show that porn is ruining sex.

I kid, of course. The glossy surveyed 68 “relationship experts” and found that the majority think X-rated material can harm relationships. The magazine also found that said experts believe porn damages women’s confidence, which is rich coming from a publication that inflames women’s insecurities in order to sell them a consumerist wet dream. I’m not going to even address the countless glaring research flaws here — that would be giving the survey far too much credit — instead, this seems a good excuse to talk about about how porn can be used to the benefit of relationships.

This isn’t at all to negate the potential for porn to be legitimately damaging. Reasonable people can agree that mainstream porn, as with most popular media, often produces unrealistic aesthetics and expectations — not to mention poor sex education and instruction, right? That’s something worth discussing in a relationship, no doubt. But instead of condemning all erotic material as an enemy to sex, what about taking the more productive route of talking about how porn can actually be good for relationships.

First off, it’s important to note that porn “is by no means monolithic,” as  Carol Queen, Good Vibrations’ staff sexologist, puts it to me in an email. “Choosing what to watch can be a great communication exercise by itself. Say one partner wants to watch gonzo and the other wants to see feminist porn; what a useful conversation that might be!” Similarly, Debby Herbenick, a research scientist at Indiana University and author of  “Sex Made Easy,” tells me in an email that porn “is so many things” — from professional to amateur, vanilla to kinky, natural bodies to artificially enhanced. ”I’m always a bit wary when I hear people say that ‘porn’ does anything specific unless they are willing to say what type of porn they mean and under what circumstances,” she says.

The inhumane sanctions of the United States and its European allies against Iran know no boundaries. At the cost of the lives of thousands of Iranian patients suffering from different types of cancer, thalassemia, hemophilia, HIV/Aids, psychiatric disorders and other diseases, the West has banned the export of life-saving medicines and medical equipments to Iran and this is deteriorating the lives of those patients who cannot find medicines needed for their survival. The companies that do business with Iran will be immediately penalized by the U.S. government and so far no exemptions have been made to ensure that ordinary Iranian citizens will at least get access to foodstuff, medicines and other humanitarian goods.

The recent wave of sanctions have also targeted Iranian media as several satellite providers across Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America have taken Iranian television channels off air, denying millions of viewers around the world the chance to find an alternative, Iranian perspective on the world affairs.

However, the sanctions have been so extensive and widespread that they even deprive the Iranian citizens from enjoying the latest productions of technology.

The internet explorer “Google Chrome” is unavailable for downloading to the Iranian users, and so are the instant messaging software “Google Chrome”, picture sharing platform “Picasa” and the geographical surveying application “Google Earth.” Although the Iranian computer geeks know tricks to circumvent these limitations, for the majority of Iranian computer users these services are not easy-to-access.

Ironically, Google lifted the limitations in early 2011 when the opponents of President Ahmadinejad had taken to the streets and staged demonstrations. Google announced that it will ease the restrictions to allow the protesters communicate more smoothly and organize rallies and mass demonstrations. “There are many activist layers on Google Earth. Anyone can create a layer to show exactly what is going on in Iran,” said Google’s head of public policy Scott Rubin.

Rubin also said that having access to Google Chrome will be also useful for the protesters: “in a country with a history of government surveillance it is useful having a browser that can’t easily be hacked.”

So it’s clear that even when the American internet giant made some concessions, it did not intend to serve the interests of the Iranian people in general, but only meant to contribute to the weakening of the government and empowerment of the opposition.

But the limitations imposed on Iranian internet users by the United States are not new or unprecedented. On August 19, 1997, President Clinton signed the 13059 executive order which stipulated harsh restrictions on Iranian internet users and computer companies in terms of using the U.S.-produced software, hardware and other technology products.

According to this order, “the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply, directly or indirectly, from the United States, or by a United States person, wherever located, of any goods, technology, or services to Iran or the Government of Iran, including the exportation, reexportation, sale, or supply of any goods, technology, or services to a person in a third country” will be prohibited.

According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, only a handful of commonplace computer applications including document readers such as Acrobat Reader, plug-ins such as Flashplayer and Shockwave and “free mobile apps related to personal communications” are legally downloadable in Iran.

In April 2003, it was reported that in a racially discriminatory and politically motivated decision, the popular career and job-finding website Monster.com removed the profiles and résumés of users from a number of countries on the U.S. Department of State’s blacklist including Iran, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Cuba, Libya and North Korea.

In a March 21, 2012 report, the CNet’s political correspondent Declan McCullagh wrote that Google has also restricted Iranian users’ access to Android Market, known as Google Play.

Collin Anderson, an independent researcher in North Dakota has listed a number of U.S.-based technology products that are unavailable to Iranian users. These products include, but are not limited to, Apple’s iOS app store, McAfee’s antivirus software, Oracle’s Java and MySQL, Adobe Acrobat Reader, DropBox, Real Player, Google AdWords, and Google Android Market.

But the unfair measures taken by the U.S. government as dictated to the American internet, IT and other technology-related service providers have gone beyond the pale and are now taking the form of racial discrimination. It was reported in June 2012 that an Apple Store in Alpharetta, Georgia refused to sell an iPhone and iPad to the Persian-speaking customers, resorting to the excuse that they may send at least one of these devices to their friends in Iran!

When Sara Sabet, a 19-year-old student of the Georgia University went to an Apple Store in a local mall with her friend to buy a couple of iDevices, the salesperson found her speaking in a foreign language. The employee asked her what language she spoke, where she was from and where the iPad and iPhone she were heading to. She responded by saying that she is from Iran and wants to send the devices to her friend in Iran. It was then that the Apple employee responded by saying, “I just can’t sell this to you. Our countries have bad relations.” Sabet said that the left the store and shed tears all the way back to home.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called the Apple Store’s treatment of the Iranian student discriminatory in a statement issued in condemnation: “Apple must revise its policies to ensure that customers do not face discriminatory treatment based on their religion, ethnicity or national origin,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad. “If the actions of these Apple employees reflected company policy, that policy must be changed and all employees retrained.”

Overall, this is how the Iranians are being treated by a government which has always been busy trumpeting its anxiety and nervousness for the protection of human rights around the world. Perhaps Iranians are paying the price for the independence of their nation and their refusal to be brought under the hegemonic domination of the United States. These sanctions which directly affect the daily lives of ordinary citizens show the extent to which the U.S. government can be brutal and ruthless to deprive a nation of its most rudimentary and basic rights. Can anyone really understand what Uncle Sam is doing?

January 14, 2013  |  

It was the era of Kazaa and we knew no better. Among my group of male friends at my austere private elementary school, watching, discussing and even sharing pornography became a sexual outlet. With the ease of downloading, we would burn CDs and swap them in school with “clever” titles taken from some album with a vague penis reference (like Will Smith’s ignominious “Big Willie Style”). That way, we could talk about porn in public, asking each other on field trips, “What did you think of that new Craig David CD I burned for you?” The “inside joke” rose to evil middle-school comic genius when other students bought the actual music albums to get in on the trend. It was a typical preteen hijink, except that the images on those CDs were far more raw than the traditional Playboy pin-up.

Both of my parents were shrinks, and even though I was generally comfortable talking about sex in my household, porn — especially the porn I was watching — just had to be taboo. It was inexplicably gross, divorced from the concept of sex as it had been explained to me. If sex was a man inserting his penis into a woman’s vagina, then how did girls drinking cum out of champagne glasses fit into that picture? Because of its unspeakable nature, Internet porn became inextricably linked with the anxiety of being caught.

I would sneak downstairs to the family computer once the house was dark. As I would settle into the polyester-cotton seat of the swivel chair and open a browser, my heart would thump with a mix of thrill and shame, my ears perked for any reason to abort my mission — zip, pull and dart with an excuse ready about checking the weather for tomorrow. (An excuse that worked more than once. I was a tidy kid). The terror and guilt would only be overridden with lust once the videos began to stream. It was an addict’s high, a high-stakes heist for sexual pleasure — an association that would not soon recede in my primal brain.

I distinctly remember the first time I ejaculated. Even back then it felt weirdly insidious — an innocent, exuberant, almost ancient moment of sexual development, stained with the futuristic debasement of a flashing screen. I leapt up from the chair at the family computer and bounded upstairs to the bathroom. I looked into the mirror, truly proud that I could now fulfill my procreative proclivities, and raised my arms and said out loud to myself, “I can be a dad.”

When I was 13, we moved to a new house with a lock on the computer room door. I was still cautious, but a few times I had my pants down when I heard the clicking of someone jiggling the locked doorknob.

Were you watching pornography?

No.

We checked the history, and there were porn sites on it.

Must be a virus.

It’s an impasse that many parents and children have known. It’s not just that it’s embarrassing, it’s paralyzing — no one knows how or exactly why to move forward. What, you want me to admit that I was watching porn? What does that do? Am I supposed to be ashamed of this? Do you expect me to stop? Everyone I know is doing this!

* * *

Those of you who’ve browsed youporn.com or redtube.com or any other porn site know the set up. The sidebar will list the categories: Mature, Hentai, S&M, gangbang, foot fetish, redhead. Under each category there are pictures and videos (but c’mon, who would look at pictures when there are videos?), and with a fast enough Internet connection, you can skip to your favorite part of a video and move on to another.

Who doesn’t use Google? Shop on Amazon? Own, or covet, some Apple device? Who doesn’t give thanks to this triumvirate of technology companies for the ways in which they add to our lives?

But is it possible that these companies are well on their way to becoming too big for their, and our own, good?

1. Google: As dominant as ever when we’re searching the Internet

Last week, after a two-year investigation, the FTC absolved Goggle of violating anti-trust laws for favoring its own services in its lucrative search engine. At issue was how Google produces its search results via its top-secret algorithm which, the company maintains, it cannot disclose for competitive reasons.

In its ruling, the FTC said that it found that “Google’s primary purpose … [is] to improve the user experience.” Google itself contends that it is “unbiased and objective” and that its search results are “the best we know how to produce.” But given that its enormous revenue is derived from this very source, questions remain.

Google made an all-out offensive to lobby Washington, a lesson learned from studying the 1990s experience of Microsoft, which was charged with monopolization for tying its Internet Explorer browser to closely go with its Windows operating system. From this, some critics think the FTC let Google off too easy  though, as Ars Technica points out, more than a few of those who have been expressing displeasure at the FTC’s ruling are precisely Google’s rivals including Microsoft.

The European Commission is to issue a ruling on Google soon and is expected to be less lenient. The reason is that “American antitrust regulators tend to focus on whether a company’s dominance harms consumers; the European system seeks to keep competitors in the market,” says the New York Times. Another factor is that Google holds an 83 percent share of the European search market, vs. 67 percent of the U.S.’s. It could be only a matter of time before the “antitrust rap” could catch up to Google — or maybe not.

2. Amazon: Poised to become the only store on earth

Holiday sales at Barnes and Noble were down 12 percent from last year’s. While there been reports of some independent bookstores thriving (hooray!), Amazon, for all that it does not make a profit (indeed, its profit was down by 96 percent in the second quarter of 2012) inexorably continues its domination as the world’s online purveyor of seemingly everything from clothes to food to books (real and electronic).

Amazon’s prices are always hard to beat and every time you turn around it seems Amazon’s added yet another business, be it streaming movies or its cloud service. Who hasn’t heard of an independent book or other store that closes its doors because it couldn’t compete with Amazon? Yet we still keep going back.

3. Apple: Does any tablet beside the iPad matter?

The iPad’s touchscreen and size made it the device I (and quite a few others) had been looking for. It was the first device my teenage autistic son could use on his own to hear music, watch videos, look at photos after years of deep frustration trying, unsuccessfully, to use a computer mouse. The iPad’s design was the answer.

The iPad’s marketshare has declined from an all-time high in August due to competition from Google’s Android and Amazon’s Kindle. Analysts are predicting that increased adoption by businesses will help Apple to reconquer the market; Germany could even be called “Appleland” due to the popularity of the company’s products there, says the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Back in June, Microsoft’s Surface tablet was announced with much fanfare but has since been little heard from and sales of software for PCs have been in decline, as well as sales of PCs themselves. It’s certainly harder and harder not to think of the iPads and tablet computers as one in the same.

It took someone with a novel way of thinking to design the iPad and other Apple devices that have made a big difference. But we can’t expect one company to keep producing all the innovative ideas. Just at the end of last week, Pinterest announced that it was taking over recipe site Punchfork. This is probably not the greatest loss or saddest occasion in the history of either the Internet or of corporate mergers. But as Alex Hern writes in the New Statesman, the annexation (ok, swallowing up) of Punchfork by Pinterest means that another idea, another novel way of doing something, will no longer exist.

It’s a loss of diversity on the web perhaps comparable in some ways to the shrinking biodiversity of wildlife as more species of animals and plants face extinction. A world of only McDonalds, Starbucks and Walmart sounds hardly appealing — a world in which Google, Amazon and Apple are the only big players would be just as poor.