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spease 2 days ago

Whose interests corporations act in is not arbitrary, it’s tied to how they make money.

Meta and Google make their money primarily from advertisers, Apple makes money from consumers buying iPhones. One of the upsides to paying for something is that the company is incentivized to keep you paying or get you to pay more.

Something I remind people who buy cheaper Android phones and then complain about ads - the OS development is being subsidized by those ads. From Google’s perspective, securing their revenue stream is the justification for Chrome and Android’s existence. It’s not a purely altruistic move to fund their open source development.

Charts of the revenue stream for some major tech companies:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-how-does-meta-make-...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/alphabets-revenue-breakdown...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-how-apple-makes-its...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-amazon-makes-its-billio...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-microsoft-makes-its-bil...

Older aggregate chart:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-big-tech-makes-their-bi...