Should We Even Care About Monopolies?
The Attraction Of The One-Stop Shop
by Paul Grimsley
Amazon want to be everything to everyone in the retail market and others. Facebook want to be plugged into every aspect of your life. Google want to program your environment. Apple are the small country you live in and whose GDP you contribute to.
It’s convenient.
But there is always the idea that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Technology has played a part in oppression before, and in the surveillance state is still doing so. Throughout the duration of the Second Worl War IBM were running punch card machines out of Nazi Germany that helped the Nazis first build a picture of the racial make-up of the German people, then to identify and move people around during the Final Solution, and finally in the cataloging of bodies and other data when the Americans moved in to tidy up afterwards.
Of course it could all go swimmingly, and there’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t have to be some huge oppressive state run nightmare that we’re talking about here. Just imagine though that you rent your TV, your computer, your door management system, your ISP is bundled up in that, and the software for you pacemaker all from the same people, and you owe them money, and they cut you off. Or, as happened in the last year, some coder adds the wrong line of code somewhere and takes down two thirds of the websites on their cloud. It’s an issue.
I once spoke to a TV Engineer who used to work on those huge old things it took ten people to lift, and he was still working on the super thin digital screens of the present day. What he said to me was, that on the surface it looks like you did something wonderful by making it all so compact, but not the components are closer together, so when one part burns out, it fritzes the others too. Harder to repair and more expensive.
When things are going well — having all your devices talk to each other is perfect, or close to that. But what really ever stays that way for long? In the last week I had myself and a computer guy chasing down an unfathomable bug in some software that disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared, and which neither of us was fully able to understand. Imagine something catching fire and burning through your own personal network.
When people look at News Media, and they see all these members of the Fourth Estate, who are supposed to provide checks and balances on those in power, all in the pockets of the same men, they balk at it, and ask for the conglomerates to be broken down, because it kills competition in the media, and it kills any form of alternative narrative — you get the news one person wants you to hear. Some think the same truisms apply to social media and technology.
When men of vision apply their skills and passion to one problem, they often see parallels in other fields and want to apply it their too. If someone is successful at implementing something on one area and they come into another area and decide to work to change that as well, then it can sometimes be pretty exciting.
Control, flow of data; the intention behind what said data is being used for — these things are becoming increasingly important. Musk, Bezos, Cook — they all have much to recommend them, but they may not always be at the helm of the company, and that can be worrying for people. Think about how some people feel when they think about the data collected by President Obama, that is now in the hands of the Trump Administration — they are unsettled.
The current pattern of the technology ecosystem seems to be that innovation is driven by start-ups, and development and scaling up is made possible by being bought out by a larger company. This is great — the problem really comes down to looking at the issue in terms of infrastructure, and how much of that should be tied down in one place, and whether this opens things up to abuse, or attack, or whether it just makes sense, because these companies have the money to do it.
If there is a market Amazon isn’t in, then that market isn’t dong much to draw their attention. If there is some area of the internet Google doesn’t have analytical tendrils snaking into, then it is something not searchable or broken. You know a company is ubiquitous when it’s name becomes a verb. I am not sure though that people Amazon — they Facebook, they Google, they Netflix and chill. Maybe one day some huge conglomerate will totally corner the market and everything we do will come under some umbrella term that covers all possible actions. We aren’t there yet, but look at the marketing for these companies, and you can sometimes see an inkling of where we’re going.
