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Are tech titans crushing competition, or is it Washington?

5 Ιανουαρίου, 2017 4:53 μμ

The luster of Silicon Valley tech firms is beginning to tarnish, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times writes, and governments around the world are taking notice:

Nearly a year ago, I argued that we were witnessing a new era in the tech business, one that is typified less by the storied start-up in a garage than by a posse I like to call the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Together the Five compose a new superclass of American corporate might. For much of last year, their further rise and domination over the rest of the global economy looked not just plausible, but also maybe even probable.

In 2017, much the same story remains, but there is a new wrinkle: The world’s governments are newly motivated to take on the tech giants. In the United States, Europe, Asia and South America, the Five find themselves increasingly arrayed against legal and regulatory powers, and often even against popular will.

Manjoo is not wrong that both the public and policymakers now view these technology firms, long seen as uniformly heroic or even god-like, with more skepticism. Some consumers worry about privacy. The political left worries about bigness, wealth, and inequality. Liberal economists recently have begun to worry about industry concentration and market power. Some conservatives may even distrust these firms for their aggressive efforts over the last decade to push the FCC to regulate broadband and wireless network firms, better known as the “net neutrality” wars.

But turning against these titans of American innovation would be foolhardy for consumers, workers, and for the US economy.

Manjoo and others lament that few new public firms are rising up to challenge the big five. But why is that? Are these firms crushing competition? Or is Washington crushing competition?