The People Vs Tech by Jamie Bartlett

Author:Jamie Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5: The Everything Monopoly

How the Tech Giants are Taking Over the World

How technology unexpectedly tends to result in monopolies. Tech firms are already transferring their economic power into political power through lobbying, but they differ from ‘traditional’ monopolies in important ways: by owning the platforms on which material is published, they have an important influence over public opinion and activism itself. This has important ramifications for how citizens practise ‘free association’, which is the basis of all independent civil society and a bulwark against tyranny. On our current path we are moving into the final phase of these monopolies – of not just economics or politics, but of culture and ideas.

THE MOST EXTREME – and in the coming years probably the most pressing – illustration of how digital tech drives inequality is the creation of massive tech monopolies. This problem is related, though slightly different, to the issues discussed in the last chapter: the tendency of powerful companies to distort politics by virtue of their size and power.

Before explaining why this is such a problem for democracies, we need a primer on how and why three of the current top five people in the Forbes Rich List are tech titans, and why the five biggest companies by market value in the world are West Coast tech firms. Lots of markets tend to concentrate on a few winners: think pharma, oil or even supermarkets. Students graduate from business schools with schemes to build monopolies, because, once established, the lack of competition allows monopolies to raise prices and increase profits. But the scale and size of today’s monopolies is entirely novel.* Back in the 1990s many predicted that the internet would slay monopolies, not create them. The popular thinking of the time – repeated over and over by the era’s digital gurus and futurists – was that the net was decentralised and connected, and so would automatically lead to a competitive and distributed marketplace.1 No one knew exactly how, but influential figures like Chris Anderson called this ‘the long tail’ and were extremely excited about it.

It seems obvious now that the nature of digital technology makes monopolies more rather than less likely. The most important reason for this is the effect of networks. If you join Facebook, your friends will be more likely to join too, which in turn makes their friends more likely to join. When everything is connected, such network effects can spread further, and far more quickly. It is such a powerful force that the biggest problem faced by Facebook today is that it’s running out of humans to connect. The same thing happens with online markets. When I was young, I bought my music at a nearby record shop, where my choices were constrained by geography and limited information. As a result I bought some niche albums. In small, local markets, there can be lots of best taxi services, best bookstores or best record shops. But, with digital markets, you only need one. Why would I use

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