The day Big Tech loses its grip on the consumer

Photo by Harshil Gudka on Unsplash

(This is an updated version of “The world after Big Tech: what the internet could look like in 2028”, cross-posted on LinkedIn earlier this year.)

After July’s Big Tech congressional hearing, many of us grew pretty certain that a case could be made to apply existing antitrust laws to Google’s ownership of DoubleClick and YouTube, or Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.

But a break-up of both companies would hardly solve the underlying issue: society’s natural trend (and strong incentives) to aggregate around a single big player for each of those value propositions. Or, as many times heard, the solution we once applied to a monopoly over supply does not work against dominance on the demand side.

It was also clear that we should be questioning Apple’s ownership of both the App Store and a digital services mammoth competing on it (as illustrated by the Spotify and Hey.com affairs). Or Amazon’s triple role as arbiter, advertising platform, and player in its own marketplace. And I still believe that breaking those two up could actually solve the problem, but they seem to be off the hook in the US for now: the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have their hands full with tackling Google and Facebook respectively.

However, an important shift in terms of political and social perception seems to be underway, and it does not even have to turn into a new regulatory framework to have an impact on the internet as we know it. If anything, we could be contemplating three outcomes:

1. Any upcoming players in the social interaction, self-publishing or collaborative media space will find an unprecedented level of institutional protection against Google, Facebook, or Apple. A highly differentiated value proposition would ensure that aggregation is constrained to a very limited set of interactions, and the current giants will find it much harder to invade a newly born, parallel universe. That is, the so-called “kill zone” is now open for business.
2. Whoever dares to challenge Amazon in specific corners of online retail should also enjoy the protection of lawmakers and antitrust enforcement bodies (shielding it from predatory pricing or marketplace discrimination). Such new players would then depend on the development of 1) to generate demand in a competitive manner through newly available channels and a more open advertising ecosystem.
3. Healthier competition on 1) and 2) would result in a bid to leverage privacy, transparency, and user control as valuable differentiators.

And, of course, we will eventually find a cross-border regulatory answer. One that focuses more on compulsory interoperability, decentralization, and open standards at every level — while maintaining strong incentives to generate profits through innovation and operational excellence within a particular value proposition.

How about waking up on January 1st 2028 and finding that we have:

• Twenty different search engines to choose from, making a living on very different business models;
• Hundreds of interoperable social networks;
• A myriad of browser options built on open, Privacy by Design standards;
• Profitable quality journalism sponsored by respectful brands;
• An ICANN-like public organization regulating mobile app indexes, and providing a means to resolve disputes (just as we have long done for domain names);
• A healthy long tail of online retailers perfectly discoverable through the same open protocols; and
• Individuals in full control over the data they share with platforms and advertisers

?

To keep on speculating, this would be seven years after the forced split of Alphabet (Google’s owner) into three separate entities, its core business having successfully embraced a PaaS (Platform as a Service) + MLaaS (Machine Learning as a Service) + SaaS (Software as a Service) model, forever leaving the digital advertising ecosystem behind. Others, perhaps even Facebook, would have followed suit.

Of course, markets would still be a carnage, as that is the nature of business, but we would end up with many more species in the savanna.