Big Tech: A coming war among the giants
“At the dawn of our new century, Google was still a search engine,” said John Herrman in The New York Times Magazine, “Amazon was best known for selling books, and Mark Zuckerberg was in high school.” Twenty years later, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have become superpowers, having “spent the past decade growing much faster than the rest of the economy.” The result is that almost all internet business now goes through them. What’s happened in the last 10 years, as well, is that the superpowers are running out of new users to sign up. This makes “the risk of open conflict among these companies in the future seem much higher.” In the next decade, Amazon might “weaponize its hosting services” or Google could flatly reject ad spending by a Chinese social app. “We’ve only known these empires during periods of expansion.” What happens if they go to war?
“I know it doesn’t feel like there are many things about tech to feel good about,” said Shira Ovide in Bloomberg.com, but there are reasons to be thankful. Not enough attention is paid to “the boring stuff,” like affordable smartphones or “software that can reduce airport delays.” Tech has also helped us unleash our creativity. Every day I see “a brilliant moment of distilled human storytelling” on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter. And the tech companies have made other companies try much harder.
“Does anyone lament the days when cable companies could count on getting paid by 95 percent of U.S. households” no matter how bad their shows were?
What to do about tech poses a new problem for regulators, said Roger Parloff in Yahoo.com. “Enforcers now encircling the four” biggest companies include the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, committees in both the House and Senate, and dozens of states’ attorneys general. But regulators have long looked to the consumer welfare standard—how customers are affected—as the bar for deeming whether a business is anti-competitive. That standard might work in Big Tech’s favor. Consider how hard it might be “to mount a major case against Amazon,” because “its low retail prices” and convenience are so beloved by consumers, regardless of “how ruthlessly it expands.”
Indeed, “Amazon will be the most important company of the 2020s,” said Matt Rosoff in CNBC.com. In the past decade, Amazon’s e-commerce business has grown eightfold in the decade to a 2019 total likely to be close to $280 billion. And it still has plenty of room to flourish. “The more powerful Amazon gets,” the more it becomes a “fat target” for lawmakers and regulators. The techlash, though, won’t stop Amazon from conquering the decade.