In Glenn’s new book, The Social Media Upheaval, he quotes Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu in The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, and then adds:
In total, Wu reports, “Facebook managed to string together 67 unchallenged acquisitions, which seems impressive unless you consider that Amazon undertook 91 and Google got away with 214 (a few of which were conditioned). In this way, the tech industry became essentially composed of just a few giant trusts: Google for search and related industries, Facebook for social media, Amazon for online commerce.” And these new tech monsters have a one-two punch that Standard Oil lacked: not only do they control immense wealth and important industries, but their fields of operation – which give them enormous control over communications, including communications about politics – also give them direct political power that in many ways exceeds that of previous monopolies.
I’m so old, I can remember when the Internet was all about diversity and looseness, rather than intertwined monopolies.