Today's tech giants are hardly the first corporations to achieve massive scale and entrench their dominance over key economic sectors. But unlike the monopolies of old, Big Tech has capitalized on the power of information itself to shut out potential competitors and manipulate consumer preferences and behavior.
CAMBRIDGE – We live in a world of giants. Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Tencent, and a few other tech behemoths have each found niches as digital service providers, acting as platforms and aggregators to secure scale, while deferring scope to individual vendors. Yet in confronting the sheer power of these firms, policymakers around the world have been focusing on size when they should be looking more precisely at how these firms are redefining our relationship with information.
CAMBRIDGE – We live in a world of giants. Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Tencent, and a few other tech behemoths have each found niches as digital service providers, acting as platforms and aggregators to secure scale, while deferring scope to individual vendors. Yet in confronting the sheer power of these firms, policymakers around the world have been focusing on size when they should be looking more precisely at how these firms are redefining our relationship with information.