These are the 5 most valuable companies in America.
Notice anything?
They’re all tech companies.
And their dominance is attracting attention from watchdog groups that say their market
power is harming competition and the economy.
Is it time to breakup big tech?
To answer you have to understand how tech has exploded.
For our purposes let’s imagine the top 5 tech giants as pacman, or pac-companies.
Except in this game, there’s no ghosts around to avoid- no blinky, no clyde, Blinky and
clyde being U.S. regulators.
For the past decade, the U.S. Has been hands-off with big tech, letting them become even bigger
by swallowing their smaller rivals or entering new markets.
Bloomberg data show that in the last 10 years the big 5 have made close to 500 acquisitions
worth about $140 billion.
Because consumers like their products, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have developed huge market shares.
For example, amazon receives 93% of all e-book sales.
Google pulls in 78% of internet search ad spending in the U.S…
Similarly Apple and Facebook dominate in high-end smartphones and social media traffic.
But being a monopoly isn’t illegal in the U.S....Or most other countries.
Regulators stopped equating big with bad a long time ago.
Monopoly cases brought by the U.S. have dwindled.
In fact, the last high-profile case was in 1998, when the justice department successfully
challenged Microsoft’s dominance of computer operating systems.
And that 20 year dry spell in monopoly cases has led some watch dogs to say that enforcement
in the U.S. has become too timid.
They say big tech is hurting innovation, jobs and wages…
And some even blame the behemoths for a decline in successful startups…
In Europe, America’s big tech companies have faced more resistance with governments
more aggressively pursuing them.
For example, the E.U. has fined Google for abusing its market dominance and Germany is
investigating Facebook for its privacy practices.
Of course big tech doesn’t think they need to be broken up.
They argue their dominance isn’t necessarily durable because new competitors can easily
jump in.
As Google likes to point out, competition is just “one click away.”