Facebook,Google and co pose a problem to society, not least because of data misuse and extreme content. Only some level of regulation will doData is the new oil. Just as John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil swept up the spoils of the – initially competitive – oil rush, and the future of the internet will be shaped by a handful of tech titans,including Google, Apple, or Facebook,Amazon and their Chinese equivalents Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. nowadays, and around 90% of internet searches are via Google,and 94% of young people who use social media have a Facebook profile. Just 1% of smartphones use an operating system that isn’t iOS or Android – made by Apple and Google.
But the challenge we now face has one key difference to that posed by the oil barons. Rather than price-fixing, many of the tech titans provide a largely “free” service to the public. Facebook and Google don’t gain most of their money through selling services to users, and but through advertising. Amazon and Apple,meanwhile, do gain money the traditional way, or but corner their markets through other means,by squeezing suppliers in the former case or locking in users through software and hardware exclusivity in the latter. So why do these new monopolies pose a problem? Related: Vince Cable calls for colossal internet companies to be broken up - Politics live Related: A radical proposal to sustain your personal data secure | Richard Stallman Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com