Trampled by Unicorns

CHAPTER 11Breaking Up Big Tech?

The sheer scale and breadth of the tech giants' reach stretches far beyond the confines of their respective industries into almost every corner of life. When we talk about the power of Google or Facebook, say, we're not only talking about their extraordinary influence over advertising; nor when we discuss Amazon or Apple do we think of them as monoliths of retail or devices. These are givens. What should really concern us is their power over our private information, our health and education data, our politics, our news, our culture, and so much more besides. Arguing whether the effective duopoly of the advertising market created by Facebook and Google is healthy is important, of course. I'd like to be shown an industry where monopoly or extreme concentration of economic power has actually brought innovation and extraordinary customer service in the long term. Telecoms? Airlines? Healthcare? Media? Oil and gas? Banking? But it also distracts us from the debate we really should be having: how as a society we choose to handle the fact that both these tech giants (and a few others) are effectively now more powerful than democratically elected governments, have the ability to shape and shift people's opinions and behaviors, and have accumulated more spending power than a medium-sized national economy—Facebook had $55 billion in cash at the end of 2019¹ and has a $605 billion market cap as I write, while Alphabet was sitting on $117 billion² and became ...