Wired‘s Nitasha Tiku has written a piece about the things that could be done in the US to curb the power of the big tech firms. It’s gives a good list of things that can practically be done in a weak anti-trust legislative environment such as the US. She cites some sobering stats about just how big the titans are:
- 90 percent of new online-ad dollars went to either Google or Facebook in 2016
- “Amazon is by far the largest online retailer, the third-largest streaming media company, and largest cloud-computing provider.”
It’s a well-researched piece, including tales about pretty sneaky moves by both Facebook and Google, reneging on promises made at the time of various acquisitions. These examples that make it evident that, despite their historical Boy Scout images, these large organisations are just that: large organisations. The solutions she proposes are sensible. But, unfortunately, only applicable in the US the the pesky trouble with legislation is that it’s made by countries. The internet doesn’t really do so well with those artificial boundaries though. Even physically severing the undersea telecommunications cables that make the internet work, just causes a reroute of your data, not a stop to its journey.
Facebook and Google have gotten big because they have access to a large chunk of the global population, not because they are US firms. Unfortunately, US legislation (mostly) stops at the US border, unlike our data’s journey through space and time. Policing their conduct using a nationally based (or even regional, the case of the more toothy EU) legislative approach is like squeezing the balloon: clamp down hard in one place and a bulge is going to appear somewhere else.
To Tiku’s list, I would add that national legislators need to put their collective heads together on this one: it’s not the type of problem that any original anti-trust legislation needed to anticipate. A globally co-ordinated approach across the legal network would be helpful in devising up new solutions appropriate for the internet economy, of which the scale and impact upon global society of the tech giants is just one. Might be just the sort of job for crowdsourcing?