You are 100% correct. The only solution is to completely ban them from operating in the country or make it economically unviable for landlords via the taxation system.
We are a very long established bricks and mortar Irish retailer that chose to go online with Shopify and use Shopify Payments for online transactions only at the beginning of the pandemic. Today, we were given essentially given a couple of days to provide invoices from all our suppliers and letters of authorisation from each of them.
We have a lot of suppliers all over Europe and this is the 14th July. To say that we are angry would be a gross understatement.
Completely agree. Just like we have financial audits for a reason, we also need some form of algorithm audit process. Present day algorithms optimised for engagement and ad revenue growth are a clear and present danger to democracy as we have known it.
RSS is by far the best and easiest way to keep up with sources you want to follow. Using RSS to get updates from curated Twitter lists is the only way to just get updates from accounts you want to follow on Twitter and maintain your sanity. I recommend NetNewsWire.
Without paid links, neither Google nor Facebook would exist. A Google ad is a paid link. The only difference in this case is that Google is the one getting paid. Ditto for Facebook. Both have become much more agressive in recent years in making sure that any clicks off their platforms are being paid for. Organic search no longer really exists for any search that can be monetised by Google, especially on mobile and some Governments are waking up to this.
There is a difference between advertisement and mandated government legislation that forces businesses to pay for links. Google still uses organic search, it simply places clearly marked ads in obvious places. If they embedded search results with hidden ads, that would be another story,
I vacationed in Barbados, and when then cruise ships would pull into Bridgetown it was remarkable. They towered over the town like a skyscraper over a suburban apartment. The area around the docks, full of hawkers and stalls selling terrible cheap food, pulsed with tourists like a vein throbbing in a forehead. A few hours later they would be gone and the ship would depart, leaving eerie silence behind. We quickly learned to stay well away if anything was docked.
