The end of the golden age of ICOs, death by Duopoly. Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Google said it will be banning Crypto Ads starting in June of 2018.
Telegram’s $1.2 Billion ICO to become the Mastercard for the decentralized economy might be one of the last big ICOs to fund its TON platform and cryptocurrency called Grams. Since ICOs were one of the ways startups were getting early-stage funding, Facebook and Google are basically doing what monopolies do and stunting the competition before they even get off the ground.
Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
This is when you realize American banking and Big Tech really do work together as a corporate elite. When Crypto is no longer able to advertise their services and innovations, it stunts the entire cryptocurrency, blockchain and crypto innovation community.
Crypto Ad-Ban will Kill the Future of ICOs
Alphabet will no longer allow ads about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice across any of its ad platforms. This in effect, will kill the ability of ICOs to do well and cut what was dubbed the Golden Age of ICOs. Of course their justification is the taking the moral high ground that many ICOs are scams and fraudulent advertising could deceive their users. However for young people, who have been early adopters of the crypto movement in support of decentralized ideals, this is what you don’t want to see from Monopoly Big Tech and lowers your trust in them.
That means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won’t be allowed to serve ads through any of Google’s ad products, which place advertising on its own sites as well as third-party websites.
The digital advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook, do a lot of shady things, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen.
To stunt an emerging field of innovation like Crypto is brutal to the future. When companies like J.P Morgan put down cryptocurrency as a “risk factor” in their official documents and the likes of Facebook “ban” all Ads related to Crypto, you know something is not quite right in the world.
As Tech Stocks are some of the hottest stocks around, the golden age of Tech Stocks is beating out the Golden age of ICOs, by any means necessary.
Facebook and Google Take Hardliner Approach to Crypto Emergence
Google and Facebook have taken hard-liner approaches to Crypto, and this bodes very poorly for Millennials and GenZ trusting them the same again. This is not how you make friends with young global citizens.
The restriction will apply both to Google’s proprietary and affiliated advertisement platforms. As tech companies around the world decide to adopt cryptocurrencies and digital tokens on their services, Facebook and Google are already behind.
The Unagile Titans of Big Tech Cannot Keep Up
Among these are Kakao, Telegram and Kik, just to name a few. The Duopoly of American Advertizing “unfree” web, certainly wants to ban the competition while they figure out how to monetize cryptocurrency hype to their advantage. As a futurist and a supporter of transparency and decentralization, this is a move I won’t soon forget by Big Tech on the little guys.
Yet their statement seem to point to consumer protection being their primary consideration.
“We don’t have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm,” said Scott Spencer, Google’s director of sustainable ads.
Yes you do know where the future is going, and Google and Facebook want to control it for their own benefit. There’s been a pretty radical propaganda campaign by Big Tech against Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and increased pressure from Big Tech means the cryptomarket is suffering and ICOs will become nearly impossible to turn into a success without the support of the two major Ad-players in the world.
The End of ICOs?
ICOs had a lot of momentum coming into 2018, the Crypto Singularity of 2017 was a huge boon to mainstream interest and this was creating a lot of startups and jobs in the blockchain and cryptocurrency community. Now with the Ad-bans from Facebook and now Google, the market for ICOs is likely to grind to a halt.
As regulators crackdown, Big Tech is following suit, and the coordinated campaign against Crypto by the institutions that rule us, means a lot of this enthusiasm and what young people are interested in doing will essentially be blocked.
The elite banking and Big Tech 1% (with some help from the FBI) at the end of the day, control the system and ICOs and Crypto were becoming too much of an outside threat to their domain and dominion to tolerate.
So shall we see the rest of 2018 the market for ICOs fizzle out? Autonomous NEXT found that $2.6 billion was raised via initial coin offerings from the beginning of 2018 up until the end of February. Yet the announcement of the Google Ban looks very ominous for the Crypto community. If you can’t get mainstream support for your project, what is the point? The Duopoly of digital advertising have such immense control over the unfree web, if they block you, you are in essence shut out from widespread exposure.
Is Big Tech Really Doing the Right Thing?
This points to a huge problem in our system of Tech Monopolies, they can gang up on the little guys and destroy innovation and new ways of thinking, for their own benefit.
The Unfree Web is Not Good for American Innovation
In an initial coin offering, a company issues its own digital currency to raise money to build out a new business or product. Initial funding for startups is harder to get than ever. Startups are in a state of decline in the U.S. as they cannot compete with Big Tech who will use any means necessary to shut them out. Now with ICOs we are seeing the same thing where Big Tech is using their monopoly status to stunt an entire industry of innovation. We know that blockchain and Crypto is where the future is, but the big players such as the Google, J.P Morgan’s, Facebook’s, Microsoft’s and others of this world, want no part in it. They will not tolerate anything that is an existential threat to their business model and user base.
A strange thing is happening, even without significant innovation companies like Apple and Facebook’s profits have never been higher. Tech stocks are going through the roof near the end of 2017 and in early 2018, but the Crypto movement is being systematically pushed down this year by powerful players and institutions. This has a lot of people concerned with the ethics of the future, and the true state of innovation in the U.S.
