The Monopolization of the Internet by Aiden Steeley

The Monopolization of the Internet Hey, tech-savvy listeners! Welcome to a special episode of Beyond the Motherboard, where we are diving headfirst into the world of the Big 5 tech companies and their dominance in the industry. I'm your host, Aiden Steeley, and today, we'll be exploring how these giants have established their monopolies and what it means for us as consumers. The Big 5 - Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – are all at the forefront of the internet, shaping how we interact, shop, and access information. Their products and services have transformed our lives, and even more so after the pandemic, but their meteoric rise to power hasn't come without controversies. Let's start with Facebook, the social media titan, yet the smallest of the Big Tech behemoths. According to a journal titled "The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: A Monopolist's Journey Towards Pervasive Surveillance in Spite of Consumers' Preference for Privacy" by Dina Srinivasan, it has an “important role in the lives of 2+ billion people across the world. Though the market was highly competitive in the beginning, it has since consolidated in Facebook’s favor”. With such a massive user base, Facebook holds a significant amount of control over the social media market, to the point of lack of competition. And on the other side of the Big 5, there's Google, the search giant that has become synonymous with internet browsing, with roughly 5 billion users worldwide, over 80% of all online users. Google's dominance in search and online advertising has led it to become the 7th company on Forbes’ Global 2000, driving out competitors to the point that the only other search engines that comes to anyone’s mind are Microsoft products, yet another of the Big 5. Now, let’s address the elephant in the room - the power of monopolies. Each of these Big 5 companies has faced allegations of exercising monopoly-like control over their respective markets, stiff-arming much of all competition. This raises important questions about consumer privacy, data security, and the potential harm to innovation and entrepreneurialism. The concentration of power in a few tech entrepreneurs that started their companies decades ago has stifled any new blood to circulate the industry, limiting the choices of the consumer down to practically only these companies, resulting in us needing to settle if presented with higher prices, inferior product quality, and limited privacy protections. According to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge there is light beyond this doom and gloom, they argue that there’s a solution to this problem, “a progressive data-sharing mandate.”, going on to say in their book, A Big Choice for Big Tech: Share Data or Suffer the Consequences, that “Under this system, every company above a certain size, say, those with more than a ten percent share of the market, that systematically collects and analyzes data would have to let other companies in the same market access a subset of its data.” Allowing us to move past this era of stop gaps in competition into one of innovation and ingenuity. Until then, thank you for listening to The Monopolization of the Internet. Stay curious, fellow scholars! Sources Cited “The Global 2000 2023.” Edited by Hank Tucker and Andrea Murphy, Forbes, 8 June 2023, www.forbes.com/lists/global2000/. Alen, Samuel T. "Too Big to Nail? Legislative Solutions to Big Tech Monopolies in an Age of Relaxed Antitrust Enforcement." Suffolk University Law Review, vol. 55, no. 4, 2022, pp. 531-558. HeinOnline, https://heinonline-org.libproxy.boisestate.edu/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/sufflr55&i=572. Charlie. “How Many People Use Google in 2023? (Users Statistics).” WP Dev Shed, 18 July 2023, wpdevshed.com/how-many-people-use-google/. Dean, Brian. “IPhone Users and Sales Stats for 2023.” Backlinko, 27 Mar. 2023, backlinko.com/iphone-users. Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, and Thomas Ramge. “A Big Choice for Big Tech: Share Data or Suffer the Consequences.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 5, 2018, pp. 48–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44823913. Accessed 2 Aug. 2023. Petrosyan, Ani. “Number of Internet Users Worldwide 2022.” Statista, 23 Feb. 2023, www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-internet-users-worldwide/. Srinivasan, Dina. “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: A Monopolist’s Journey Towards Pervasive Surveillance in Spite of Consumers’ Preference for Privacy.” Berkeley Law, 26 Nov. 2019, lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876.