Darrell Castle talks about tech tyrants such as Amazon, Facebook and Twitter and their efforts to silence opposing views by banning books and thoughts.

Transcript/Notes

TECH TYRANTS

When I was in law school in the mid to late 1970’s, we had a course called Antitrust and one of our most respected law professors taught that subject. He used to tell us stories of how he spent 20 years working for the government on the case of U.S. v. DuPont and how that case eventually forced DuPont to break apart.

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday March 8, 2019 and on this Report I will be talking about the continuing efforts of the Tech Tyrants as they use their information monopolies to censor anyone and everyone they happen to disagree with. This Report deals with a subject that reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451 which was set in a future where books were outlawed and firemen would burn any they found. The number 451 was the temperature at which books would burst into flame. In 1966 the book was made into a fairly successful movie. Today it isn’t necessary to burn books since they can be digitally banned, but the effect is the same.

Antitrust is not my field but the premise behind it is that no company should control the entire market because it stifles competition and hurts the consumer. Fast forward to today and you will see that Amazon not only controls virtually all of its own market, but it is threatening other markets in its product chain. Amazon trucks now roam the streets in competition with Fed Ex and UPS. I have even seen reports that Amazon would like to buy Fed Ex.

For purposes of our discussion, Amazon controls the market for online book sales to the extent that virtually every brick and mortar bookseller in the country is bankrupt and out of business. The result is that, if you write a book or have a book to sell, you will sell it on Amazon or you won’t sell it. Now that Amazon has developed market control to the extent that it has almost 100 percent of the market, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, and his board, have apparently decided that they can now ban any book or opinion that they disagree with.

Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, and reportedly the world’s richest man at $140 billion dollars, is also one of the world’s most powerful men because he decides which opinions are worthy to be heard and which are not. He also owns the Washington Post so he always gets his opinions published, just not those he disagrees with. Now that Amazon has bought Whole Foods, it is in the grocery business as well, but that is not enough for Mr. Bezos. He also wants to develop his own chain of grocery stores to compete with every other store in America and perhaps the world thus controlling the food supply of all of us.

I wonder if it scares anyone in government, anyone in the Justice Department, that one company, and in effect one man, will soon control every opinion we are able to publicly state, as well as almost everything we eat. Perhaps I’ve hit on something here and the actual reason this company wants to gobble up the entire world is power, not money. I mean, what’s another billion to a man like Bezos. But power, that addictive drug, is so alluring. What could be more ego satisfying to a power junkie than the power to control which thoughts can be expressed and which cannot.

Goliath takes us down the road to totalitarian thought control, and I suppose that when Mr. Bezos is able to ban all bad thoughts, the only thoughts left will be pure like his. It seems that Amazon has been on course to digitally burn all those books the company disagrees with. Remember that if you don’t sell on Amazon you don’t sell. Many authors of many books have been taken down and are no longer available in any format.

Unfortunately Amazon is not alone in its efforts at thought control. Financial institutions, such as PayPal,