The Fediverse Community versus Full-time employment at GoogleThanks @
Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) In 2021, Google has 135,301 full-time employees in 70 offices around the globe. In 2016, most are in Research and development, Sales and marketing, Operations, and General and administrative, in that order. Obviously, these 135,301 full-time employees in 70 offices get paid and rent is paid. Average salaries are over $100 000.
To make things easy for me, the direct cost of salaries at Google are $13 530 100 000 each year, or $13,5 billion USD annually. Google's revenue amounted to 181.69 billion US dollars, largely made up by advertising revenue, which amounted to 146.9 billion US dollars in 2020. Salaries from Google employees are taxed, perhaps something like 30% - who knows, so $4 billion USD is collected as taxes from employees. Google, like other multinational companies, pays the vast majority of its corporate income tax in its home country. Google pays tax in other countries, but has been known to try to reduce the amount by moving to tax havens. Regardless of the ethics for now, Google obviously pays billions of USD in tax in the USA and other countries, e.g. Google Netherlands Holdings BV paid 3.4 million euros in taxes in the Netherlands in 2017.
The amount contributed from employee income tax and corporate tax by the Fediverse community from the operation of the Fediverse is unknown, but from 2010 to now it is at best in the millions, if not less.
The amount of decentralized COMMUNITY contributed by the Fediverse is quite something else. The community GAIN can be quantified as the total size of the nodes or the number of interconnections per node of social graph of the Fediverse with regard to the total number of hubs, where more hubs is better than fewer hubs.
However, as of February 2021, the total decentralized community is still very small compared to the GAFAM like super-powers. Facebook alone has over a billion members.
It has never happened, or almost never happened, that something that generates jobs, revenue and taxes is shutdown by protests about this something making money. The money making something must be truly terrible for that to happen. Slavery as being the property of someone else is gone and not allowed by law, but continues in human trafficking and less than minimum wage to this day. Big-Tobacco fought tooth and nail for decades. Coal, oil and gass are known to pollute the air we breath, smog and respiratory diseases follow, and the staggering increase in the Earth temperature because of human activity through letting out CO2 which prevents the excess heat from going into space are established scientific facts. And yet they are allowed to continue while work is done to switch to something that is supposed to be better and equally profitable.
In light of the above - jobs, revenue, taxes, "Google makes money from your data" is the weakest, dumbest, most infantile argument ever told on the Fediverse. Yes, privacy is important. However, such a claim is easily refuted or corrected if prompted by law makers too, "We separate the personallly identifiable information from the rest, analytics is done on anonymous data, and we only sell anonymous data". The centralized services will win in court, or be lightly slapped with fine. If you want more decentralized services and more people to join the Fediverse, like I do, then we must come up with something better.
The Fediverse has come up with a decentralized community with built-in privacy, now it needs to come up with a decentralized economy too, one where "infinite growth" is built out of it, we don't need it.
Source: Statista
#^https://www.statista.com/statistics/219333/number-of-google-employees-by-department/#^https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-time-google-employees/#^https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Google/salaries#^https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-taxes-netherlands-idUSKCN1OX1G9 
