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It's not the bursting of a dot.com bubble, more like an annoying software glitch that returns again and again until you finally chuck your laptop across the room in disgust. The halo that once floated over internet commerce has vanished. The e-corporations, hailed as models for capitalism in a new era, are beginning to look like tawdry street vendors offering low-wage, dead-end jobs; the standard bearers of personal freedom are exposed as ruthless tax dodgers and secret porn merchants.
On Monday, workers at Amazon's huge warehouses in Germany went on strike, complaining that the American company was short-changing them, paying a rate below the standard hourly minimum paid to retail workers. Yesterday's strike, the third walk-out since the beginning of April was organised by Ver.di, a shop workers' union, at Amazon's warehouses in Leipzig and Bad Hersfeld, two huge facilities employing some 5,000 staff.
It's Amazon's first big bust-up with organised labour in Europe and it's about more than just wages. The U.S. company's free-wheeling business model is under direct challenge by Germany's long-established system of collective bargaining which sets social norms across different regions of the country. Ver.di says Amazon should pay its Bad Hersfeld workers €12.18 ($16.43) per hour, the standard tariff agreed by retailers in Hessen compared with Amazon's rate of €9.83. The U.S. firm refuses, arguing that it is not a retailer but a logistics company, although competing German catalogue retailers comply with the tariff.
Meanwhile in France, U.S. internet companies are under regular attack for what is seen as their malign effect on the Gallic cultural landscape, and the French government has threatened to impose a tax on internet devices. According to today's Financial Times, Aurelie Fillipetti, the French culture minister, has accused Amazon of dumping and being a "destroyer of bookshops."
Amazon enjoyed a decade-long honeymoon in Europe, courted assiduously by governments and local authorities, keen to secure employment. But the dreariness and long hours trudging through Amazon's cavernous warehouses is taking its toll on workers who are often overqualified and no longer just grateful for work. The blow from below is occuring just as Amazon is being beaten about the head by politicians in Britain over its adept use of a tax shelter in Luxembourg to keep its payments to HM Treasury down to a trifling sum.
It would be a mistake for anyone to think that these are nought but teething problems, the headaches of growing up for Amazon and its teenage internet brethren, Google and Facebook. There are fundamental questions that must be answered by internet companies about their social utility, about what they contribute beyond dull jobs in cubicles and warehouses. It will not go unnoticed by governments that the biggest contributors to state coffers are not the "sexy" internet companies but the old bricks and mortar enterprises. It is telling that the most tax is not being paid by titans of new technology but big bad oil; in the five years to 2012, ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips were America's biggest taxpayers in absolute terms.
No surprise that the state should want to tax the rent collected by oil companies. But internet companies feed off the world-wide web in a manner not unlike extractive miners and oil drillers. Moreover, the rich seam of internet users only exists because governments funded the research in the universities and military labs that made the web possible.
After a certain age, it no longer looks cool to dress like a kid; it's time for Google and Amazon to start to behave like grown-ups.
Carl Mortished is a contributor to ROB Insight, the business commentary service available to Globe Unlimited subscribers. Click here for more of his Insights.
Carl Mortished