...Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence. .... This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

The future of the Internet is here: non-English extensions hit the Web - only took 30-odd years, too #web #tld

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