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Breaking Up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook Could Save Capitalism, NYU Professor Says (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: If you want to get an idea of how quickly sentiment has shifted against U.S. tech giants, just listen to NYU professor Scott Galloway. [...] "After spending the majority of the last two years of my life really trying to understand them and the relationship of the ecosystem, I've become 100 percent convinced that it's time to break these companies up." It's an audacious claim from anyone, even more startling coming from someone who has been such a close and bullish observer of these tech giants. Yet for Galloway, it is clear that the four companies have simply become too big, and too powerful. "The premise of my book is that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are our new gods, our new source of love, our consumptive gods," he said. "And as a result of their ability to tap into these very basic instincts, they've aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation's GDP ... I think these entities are more powerful than any entity, with maybe the exception of China and the U.S."
[...] Galloway said he wasn't making his argument based on many of the current emotional outcries against the companies, though these are important to note. And he proceeded to list what he considers to be these giants' numerous sins. "There are reasons to be angry at them," he said. "They basically power fake news ... So the notion that our platforms have been weaponized by the intelligence unit of a foreign adversary was initially responded to by Facebook as crazy, that we were crazy for thinking that. Then we found out it was millions of people, and now we're finding out it was hundreds of millions of people who were exposed."
[...] Galloway said he wasn't making his argument based on many of the current emotional outcries against the companies, though these are important to note. And he proceeded to list what he considers to be these giants' numerous sins. "There are reasons to be angry at them," he said. "They basically power fake news ... So the notion that our platforms have been weaponized by the intelligence unit of a foreign adversary was initially responded to by Facebook as crazy, that we were crazy for thinking that. Then we found out it was millions of people, and now we're finding out it was hundreds of millions of people who were exposed."
> aren't monopolies bad for capitalism, and by extension, bad for a national economy in general?
No, abuse of monopoly power is bad for capitalism. Monopolies are often useful for supplying a service that wouldn't be supplied otherwise, usually because of high barriers to entry.
> All the above-named corporations have de-facto monopolies
Why, because they're big? What is Apple monopolizing? Phones? No. Computers? No. For Google, Bing is a large competitor, and there are other search engines people could switch to the very next time they search. Walmart is a decent competitor for Amazon. Facebook - Google+, SnapChat, WhatsApp, etc. I don't see how any of these companies have exclusive control to anything.
I believe a similar logical outcome is evident in politics, where it's a mathematical 'certainty' that any democracy will end up in a two party state.
I'm pretty sure that's not a characteristic of democracy in general, only of democracy with first-past-the-post voting.