Google is like a band that has a great debut album but everything else afterwards sucks. They still have enough fans from their early work to live off of so they don't feel the need to do anything different.
1. The government crackdown on independent contractors working under 1099s. The government was worried that too many people were not paying into SS which would undermine its solvency. They then put out a whole bunch of restrictions which companies did not put in the effort to enforce.
The result was that companies stopped using 1099s and started doing this staffing through agencies. Since the agencies can take up to half the pay a contractor may receive that resulted in substantial less money being taken home by the independent contractors.
2. Affordable Care Act (ACA). The government decided that all people with pre-existing conditions need to have access to health insurance. How did they achieve this? By forcing only the people in the individual market to subsidize them. I remember when I got a quote for a policy that would take affect after the passage. It was more than twice what I was paying. I decided then to get a full time job.
A company can simply hire workers on a probationary period of say 60 days and then determine whether or not to keep them. With contract workers they will keep them for 18 months and then decide to let them go.
MCSE was more like two decades ago and they were promising 60-70K back then. I think the salary expectations may be a bit on the high side here depending on location but nowhere near as bad as a lot of these trade schools offer.
Net neutrality does nothing to stop that. It does not prevent data caps or tiered pricing based upon data usage. The ISP is still allowed to exempt any traffic they wish from any data cap that is put into place. That is how wireless carriers offer free Netflix with signup.
If states want to ban the use of fast lanes then the ISP can change their pricing to allow data caps. You want the unlimited data cap then its ~$120/month. 300 GB will cost ~$80/month, etc.
The ISP can then exempt their own services and the services of preferred partners from the data caps. This will achieve the same results for the ISP without violating Net Neutrality.
So according to the summary there are 25,000 apps (skills) available on Alexa. The market is expected to be worth 50 million next year. So that comes out to an average of $2000 per skill. Obviously that won't be distributed evenly so the median payoff for each skill will likely be less than $500.
This is the smartphone economy repeating itself. At least with smartphones there are some business use cases but this stuff is all consumer based. The only money you get is what Amazon considers your product to be worth. I think most good developers can find a better use for their time.
Technically since the article is about England this is about the LECs not the ISPs. The LEC manages the physical connection and the ISP provides the Internet service.