How much is your data worth? By Martha Harbison As I’m sure you know, The Cloud is the future, and you’d better get to elevation, fast! The ways in which these trends have combined, however, have produced the peculiar results that have actually reordered things. Welcome to the mobile revolution! Allow me to introduce you to network effects. On their own, each of these trends is, at most, an airport book. In the past decade, there was also a wholesale migration of online services to a small group of conglomerate hosting companies, from which start-ups and venerable tech firms alike can rent space and computing power instead of investing in costly, and ultimately inferior, physical infrastructure themselves. The internet is now mobile - available almost anywhere - which has significantly expanded the user base and use cases for all sorts of services: You can buy from Amazon while standing in a Walmart, or check Instagram while you’re watching TV. But whatever else this web was, it was spacious. It was built by, and for, people used to accessing networks through computers for all its professions of freedom and open access, this web was exclusive by default, rooted firmly in an era in which digital participation was economically and socially limited. This web never fully lived up to its boosters’ ideals of free, mutually beneficial cooperation, of open standards and citizen empowerment, but it was closer than today’s internet. Google was still a search engine, Amazon was best known for selling books and Mark Zuckerberg was in high school. Unfortunately for them, they’re also stuck with one another.Īt the dawn of our new century, the web was still relatively federated - a messy, sprawling network of sites and services, some serving millions of users, some just a few. Unfortunately for us, theirs are empires we’re stuck with for the foreseeable future. We, and the rest of the internet between us and them, are but subjects on the surface of a planet they’ve fully colonized and terraformed. To start an internet company is to submit to one or many of them from the start. To use the internet, in 2019, is to engage to some degree with the handful of private entities that control it. The tech giants, in becoming tech superpowers, have been growing in every direction beneath our feet, becoming tangled in ways that we cannot easily see and, together, improvising a new world order that is increasingly hard to route around, or to escape. Competition is something you do in a market you share with others it is, in the Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel’s words, “for losers.” Overlap is what might occur when sovereign powers happen to occupy the same space, or lay claims to the same populations in the normal course of conquest. “We overlap with them in different ways,” he said, answering as if the question were flawed. He struggled to name one, instead gesturing vaguely at “the other tech platforms,” including Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Testifying before two Senate committees in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was asked about his company’s biggest competitor. To comprehensively take on Facebook’s expanding coalition of megaservices is implausible the best a competitor can do is create some sort of service that might steal away time or advertising dollars. This alone complicates the idea of competition. Google is much more than a search engine Amazon is much more than a simple e-commerce site. Reaching a billion users is a successful conquest keeping them, and turning their continued allegiance into lasting power, is empire. What they’ve become are superpowers, whose imperative for growth has been replaced with a need to fortify, ally and extract. They were expansionary powers, chasing and luring new customers by the hundreds of millions, laying claim to territory and souls with the zeal of missionary explorers. They’re diversified conglomerates whose power is greater than even their staggering user numbers suggest. But it’s not enough to simply take their measurements. They’re no mere incumbents, either they’re some of the biggest companies in the world. The tech giants haven’t been considered start-ups for years, and in some cases decades. It has been a great worst year ever, and next year is promising to be pretty good, too, as well as much, much worse. These ostensibly embattled firms recorded billions of dollars in profits, and can reasonably expect to continue to do so. Whatever reckonings they’ve faced so far, and whatever backlash they’ve endured - in the press, on Capitol Hill - have been easily absorbed in financial terms. Any suggestion that Big Tech has had a rough time must contend with this fact: Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent the past decade growing much faster than the rest of the economy.
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