06 Nov Big Tech: Slave New World
Ten years ago, the world's five largest companies by market capitalization were Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup, Shell Oil, and Microsoft. Today only Microsoft remains in the top five, where it has been joined by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet (the parent company of Google). Yep, all tech companies, each dominating its corner of the industry. Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger own 77 percent of mobile social traffic. And Google has a whopping 88 percent market share in search advertising. Welcome back to the early 20th Century, when the great jurist and later Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis argued for the necessity of ending monopolies, because he knew that in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power was dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people. We witnessed this ourselves in the behavior of...