Question: Please comment on the ethical responsibilities of tech giants. They tend to work for the sake of the bottom line. And I know there is a culture of thinking that they just need to get the most traffic to their platforms, no matter what the consequences. They make a lot of money. They get high incomes without any consideration of responsibility. But the users of their platforms and society pay a lot of the side effects of that. They need to be held accountable.
Answer from the Ascended Master Staint Germain through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 Easter Webinar.
The problem with the tech giants is that any time you have a new industry, it takes time for governments to catch up with what is actually happening. You can see, for example, in the last few years after the 2008 financial crisis, many governments became aware that they needed to regulate banks, for example, and investment banks, so that there would not be another economic meltdown. They imposed various regulations on banks. But what have investors or financiers done? They have created what is called non-banks or shadow banks that function much the same as a bank, but they are not under government regulations. You saw, of course, the same thing that happened with the entire Silicon Valley tech bubble in the early 2000s, where there were all of these new companies that were created, and they were very different from traditional companies. And you saw how many of the big corporations of the time, they could not figure out what to do about computer technology because it did not fit their traditional business model.
Governments have been very reluctant to go in and regulate this market, this new industry, because they do not really know how to deal with it based on traditional models, but you will see that there have been efforts made, especially by the EU, to regulate both Google and Facebook and hold them more accountable to democratic standards, the laws, and also, pay taxes. There have been attempts to make even online retailers like Amazon pay taxes and sales tax in respective countries. It is something that is on its way, and it will be accelerated in the coming years. The EU is most likely to be on the forefront of this, whereas the United States will lag behind because of the resistance in the United States coming from the neoliberals and the lobbyists, and even those among the people who have bought into this lie that government regulation and big government is dangerous.
You can either have big government or you can have big business, because the only thing in a democratic country that can regulate big business is the government. You can see from the 2008 financial crisis that speculators cannot regulate themselves. They do not know when to stop. They will continue going as long as they think they can make a profit, and they will not stop themselves. They will only stop when the market collapses. And then, of course, they will cry out to the government to bail them out because they are too big to fail.
Basically, you can say that if you take the concept that a business is too big to fail, fine, then let’s apply this to the overall economy. How can we prevent businesses from becoming so big that they are too big to fail? Because if we have a free market economy, then really the idea that a business is too big to fail is against the whole concept of a free market. And it is certainly against neoliberal ideas.
What government needs to do is to step in and prevent companies from becoming too big by creating various kinds of regulation that protects the people, not only from the inordinate profits that have a devastating effect on the economy, but also protects the people from being affected by companies who can then avoid any kind of accountability.
Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels