Tech giants, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are changing the way we digest and use the Internet. They are streamlining their services to make your Internet life easier and more accessible. Google's AMP for mobile, for example, is stealing traffic from the actual website to their scraped and streamlined version of the website. When I first used services like these, I was easily fooled into thinking that the website had implemented a half-decent mobile implementation. I was dead wrong.

This is just the start of something much larger than countries and politics.. These are capitalistic corporations after all. They are controlling pretty much every sector of our lives and definitely our machine lives, both directly and indirectly for all things connected to the Internet. We use Google exclusively for all things search, directions, email - some even go as far to connect their entire phone operating system (*cough* Android *cough) to the Google hive mind.

I used to believe these companies were only using your data for moral good. Google offers many free services in exchange for one thing... Your soul. Just kidding, they're only after your private data. Data is quickly becoming the most valuable thing to own in the 21st century, well that and Bitcoin. Facebook only wants every photo of you (including your nude photos - WTF) - from birth until death - to build an epically-sized facial recognition system, and Amazon knows all of your web preferences and shopping needs. They make things incredibly easy for us lazy folk. Just add a "Sponsored" tag and no-one will bat an eye.

Using technology to automate and improve the efficiency of society is quite amazing. We are only at the tip of many life-changing advancements in our lifetime. Many of these companies are driving us towards maximizing our digital symbiosis with computers. However, we must ask ourselves - at what cost? All of these tech giants are one hack away from exposing all of our chats, secrets, and tendencies. We cannot have a single point of failure in this corporate internet.

Epilogue
What I wrote above was in July 2017. Things have gotten much much worse since then...

• Remember the Equifax hack exposing a majority of American's social security numbers?
• Remember the Verizon security breach?
• Remember Yahoo's total fail at protecting email accounts?
• Remember Uber's attempt at covering up a multi-million user hack?
• Remember the NSA's security "secrets" being compromised and subsequently used by the WannaCry ransomware?

Worst of all, net neutrality is dead. Ajit Pai, the biggest Verizon shill out there, disregarded millions of citizens' complaints and also faked many comments, including Obama's. This is fucking frightening. The corporate takeover of politics is reaching the pinnacle of control. Driven by the greed of profits, these ISP's will slowly erode our basic freedoms of communication and attempt to control and monitor our everyday lives.

We need to protect our privacy, our data, our freedoms. Use a VPN. Use Firefox. Use Tor. Use DuckDuckGo. Your privacy and data are not for sale. Fuck the ISP's supporting any sort of fast lane or pay-per-app charge. The Internet is a basic, human right and utility. Let's fight to keep it that way.