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Is Tech Too Big To Control? TikTok, Apple And Facebook Provoke Policy Headaches

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Tech giants are becoming stock market monsters, should they be broken up, taxed or embraced as strategic partners?
There is no better template for the state of the world than the technology industry. In the highly globalized world of the mid 2000’s, Google had one third of the internet search market in China, while today it has close to zero. The internet is becoming multipolar – the US has internet giants that have become stock market monsters, Europe has few tech giants of its own but is leading the regulatory charge on technology, whilst China has on one hand ring fenced its internet space, whilst at the same time generating the world’s leading thriving e-commerce sector and driving tech into social policy.
Multipolar tech world
Technology is interesting in many other respects, but the one I find thrilling is the way it now crosses into every domain – politics, economics, markets and society. It arguably is more pervasive than the new technologies of prior periods of globalization – such as the steam engine and railways (though the technology sector will never match the 60% share of the market capitalization of the US market that railways enjoyed in 1900).
It is not surprising then that there is a broad feeling that tech is too big for its boots. Economically, e-commerce firms like Amazon are big enough to have pricing, scale and distributional advantages that suppress smaller players (and that large ones like Walmart do not seem able to match) and the same may be true of Apple’s Appstore supermarket. Google and Facebook have become advertising behemoths and politically indispensable. Financially, these firms now account for nearly a quarter of the market capitalization of the US market (Apple added USD 170 bn in market capitalization on Friday alone), and as such have become a huge ‘swing’ factor for pension funds, the ETF (exchange traded fund) industry and day traders.

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