Technology and Tyranny

Snowden Leak Reveals Harmfulness of US Monopoly on Internet

https://www.rt.com/news/319522-snowden-leak-us-monopoly/

"The NSA's mass surveillance would not be possible if the internet wasn't controlled by just a few major US companies, Nikolay Nikiforov, Russia's Communications minister told RT after the first BRICS ministerial meeting on the de-monopolization of IT.

'Snowden's disclosures showed exactly the harmfulness of monopoly because it would not be possible if the world IT sector should be structured in a more balanced way.'

Nikiforov said, that as things stand, US security agencies have the power to just 'come to several companies and force them...to actually provide illegal access to hundreds of millions of records of private users data globally.

Russia's Communications and Mass Media minister stressed that, in purely economic terms, the monopoly is also harmful:

'The monopolist can dictate certain price levels. Each country in the world is actually sending out billions of dollars outside its national economies as license fees..for key technologies,' he explained."