From Troy Wolverton in Business Insider: Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon have too much power — so it’s time for regulators to take on tech’s titans.
Their power is having negative effects in a wide range of areas. Facebook’s and Google’s duopoly control of digital advertising is helping to kill off much of the publishing industry. Facebook’s unprecedented scale and the sheer amount of data it has on its users have made it a target for propaganda artists seeking to influence national elections.
At the same time, Amazon’s growing market dominance is undermining the traditional brick-and-mortar retail industry. Apple is siphoning off nearly all of the profits in the smartphone industry, hindering other companies’ ability to innovate or compete.
My take: Where to start? Apple doesn’t destroy jobs, it creates them—by the hundreds of thousands. It doesn’t hollow out shopping malls, it attracts foot traffic wherever it opens a store. And if the Androids don’t like competing in the smartphone industry Apple created, who’s to blame for that?
“Apple is siphoning off nearly all of the profits in the smartphone industry, hindering other companies’ ability to innovate or compete.”
In agreement with Philip, the above statement is a bit of a non sequitur. Apple is making profits by investing heavily in itself and its new technologies. Its competitors could choose to do that, too, but they don’t: they aim to make margin by being cheap, rather than by being profitable.
The “logical lumping”, is, of course, obvious – and lazy: the author takes the extended FAANGs and drops Netflix … because nobody seems to be talking much about Netflix much these days, except as a tooth in the FAANGs. Interestingly, NFLX is up about 100% YOY at yesterday’s market close. Go figure!
“And if the Androids don’t like competing in the smartphone industry Apple created, who’s to blame for that?”
Brilliant!!!!!
Surely we heard the same critiques of the Medici during the Renaissance.
Don’t let the Fuggers get you down!
(sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.)
Business Insider isn’t journalism. It’s click bait, devoid of any value except confirmation that Henry Blodget remains an embarrassment to Wall Street.
I’m not sure we should discount this as mere click bait. It IS click bait, of course, but I hear the ever-growing drumbeat of regulation and anti-trust everywhere I go. Leading the charge (at least on my Twitter feed) is Professor Galloway. Benedict Evans seems to be acting as a mild counter-weight. He continually points out that it would be difficult to “break up” the existing tech companies into meaningful sub-units.
I fear we’re about to enter an era of frenzied anti-trust talk. I guess I should not be surprised at that. Rather, I should be surprised that it took this long. That’s probably a tribute to just how valuable to big tech firms are to our lives. The public wasn’t interested in breaking them up until they started to see them as a threat, rather than as a friend.
There is an almost entertaining quality to this piece. I would not have been surprised if the last line of it had read, …and hey, you damn kids get off my lawn!
The gripe I’ve got with Facebook & Google is that they’ve gobbled up much of traditional media’s advertising income, but they are not providing edited or curated content. Providing editing would mean less money for the internet giants, but it would also provide jobs for editors and professional journalists, whose absence caused problems with our last presidential election.