Three corporations threaten to dominate global business, politics

A comedy TV show called Get Smart in the 1960s starred two agents – Agent 89 and Agent 99 – fighting to keep the world safe from an Eastern European agency called CAOS.

Some 40 years later the world is facing potential takeover by three corporations with more power than CAOS ever had and supported by one-third or more of the planet’s population.

They are everyday names – Facebook, Google and Amazon.

All are public companies with a combined market value of $1.8 trillion, give or take a billion or two.

These companies exert more control on our lives than any other set of corporations or government.

Google dominates the Internet search engines with tremendous advertising revenues sucked from other media. Annual profits of $30 billion are used to subsidize other unprofitable ventures: Google Home controls, Waymo self-driving cars and a host of other technological innovations. Facebook with two billion users dominates online social media. When it comes across a promising upstart competitor Facebook buys it out like it did with Instagram. Amazon dominates online retailing with sales of $894 billion. Amazon has used cloud storage service technology profits to subsidize the online retailing business before it became profitable.

The Amazon online retail business is destroying small business across the globe. All three have used profits from other lines of business to subsidize losing ventures and buy out competitors.

Generally anti-competition laws in most countries frown on use of profits to subsidize and grow other lines of business. So far, aside from some European Union rulings and U.S. justice department ramblings nothing is being done.

These companies are so domineering and so popular any action against them could stir political backlash.

Yet they can be and are used by their owners or other users to influence and determine elections. The last U.S. presidential election was but one example.

Their dominance and disruptive power was shown by a speculative announcement that rattled stock markets: stock prices of freight companies FEDEX and UPS took deep hits when Amazon announced it was just considering building its own cargo company. Facebook rattled government cages earlier this year with plans for a global digital currency called Libra. To try and satisfy government Libra is a consortium involving MasterCard, Visa and a host of other companies.

The existence of Libra will threaten the authority of individual governments to manage interest rates, money and budgets. The Libra currency could supplant use of the U.S. dollar, Euro and Chinese Yuan as trading currencies for exports and imports. Most of the planet’s population is impacted daily by one or all of these technology giants from sharing information to finding information to making purchases to having our supposedly private data used to sell us stuff.

This is one of those cases where the genie is out of the box, has gone out of control with no one apparently willing or able to do something corrective about the situation.

Ron Walter can be reached at ronjoy@ sasktel.net