America’s Metabolism

The rapid growth of the American economy has been accompanied by a high concentration of mergers in various industries: the monopolies of large companies have become increasingly unassailable. The accumulation of wealth has not benefited the broad masses of people, and the social gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Facebook’s “Cambridge Data Gate” made the public realize that the power of the tech giants has gone beyond the economic sphere. It has penetrated into every aspect of politics and society. Our life is controlled by the big tech companies.

Although several tech giants have been repeatedly investigated and punished by the European Union in recent years, the U.S. government has been relatively lax in its antitrust regulation of tech giants over the past decade or so. In the past 20 years, Google has bought more than 270 companies, according to Tim Wu, a Columbia professor. They bought 34 companies in 2011 and 34 in 2014, and on average they buy and buy every ten days.

Facebook has bought 90 companies in the past nine years, including the famous acquisition of Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email when he bought Instagram and revealed it in the New York Post, which suggests that he bought Instagram because he saw it as a competitive threat. The potential problems such as unfair pricing, user data use, bundling sales, and business exclusion caused by technology giants’ monopoly advantages still need to be paid attention to. At the same time, technology giants are also actively coping with government regulation through active innovation, openness and transparency, and other ways.

The United States is a free country, the development of the United States in every period requires the metabolism such as the breakup of Rockefeller, the breakup of Microsoft. When society becomes unfree, the government and the people of the United States break down its walls. I can imagine if Microsoft hadn’t been broken up, there would have been Apple or Facebook. I think these companies will be acquired by Microsoft as they grow as Facebook did with Instagram. We can see that these giant technology companies will be broken up in the future because it affects the development and freedom of the United States.