Amazon or Facebook?
“The Frightful Five,” as Manjoo calls Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, “run server clouds, app stores, ad networks and venture firms, altars to which the smaller guys must pay a sizable tax just for existing.”
For the dominant tech companies, Manjoo writes, the startup economy “has turned into a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition—they love startups, but in the same way that orcas love baby seals.”
All of this is not to diminish the many benefits using Google, Facebook, and Amazon has brought us. They are popular services for a reason. And, certainly, the hand-wringing over the power of large businesses is not new. The news three years ago that Google announced it was buying Nest spurred my former colleague Wade Roush to reconsider his previous complacency about their outsized influence.
“When one organization controls so much of the infrastructure of the digital economy, it’s not good for consumers,” he wrote in 2014. “I’m looking at Google and starting to feel that this Silicon Valley success story—and the resulting concentration of wealth, brainpower, and ambition, not to mention data—has gone too far.”
And that consolidation does not necessarily support the development of yet-untapped technologies. “Global companies are where innovation goes to die,” Roush wrote, citing examples of young startups that were bought and eventually shut down or ignored. (It’s worth noting that Nest as a company is very much still alive and kicking, though maybe it’s interesting to wonder what more could have been innovated if it had stayed independent.)
And there’s evidence that Big Tech’s power is not absolute, because other companies are managing to build tech businesses apart from the “Five.” Manjoo points to IAC’s stable of brands, which include Expedia, Tinder, and Vimeo.
But given Big Tech’s increasingly personal and omniscient role in our lives—I mean, Alexa is listening to us at home 24/7 and Facebook is working on technology that can create texts from thoughts—perhaps it’s worth thinking about what this ubiquity means for the future.
Is it too late to gain back the ground we’ve ceded to Big Tech? Maybe. But being aware of their power while also making sure that conditions exist to support young innovative companies—even in the most unlikely of communities—could help rebalance the scales, delivering even greater returns for us all.
