A century ago a company* set out to control the oil business. The secret of its success was control - it dominated production, ran all the refineries and pipelines and owned all the ships, tankers and petrol stations. It squeezed out competition with ruthless price cutting until only it was left.
Does that M O ring any bells? Are there certain online companies out there doing the same thing nowadays? Does it matter? It should do, because the next thing that oil company did when it had the control it sought was to hike the prices.
Some may argue that our high street stores should have upped their online game, should have seen online shopping coming - and Covid will not have helped, with everyone being locked-down - unable to visit shops and stores. But these tech giants are gaining more than just our shopping from us - they have data on everyone who uses their facilities (yes, my books are on Amazon Kindle - so, me included) and do we know what they do with that data? Do they sell it to the highest bidder - to any bidder? Does it matter? Well, it might if it's sold to someone you would rather it wasn't. But you have no control over that - you don't know and have no way of finding out with whom these tech giants are trading your personal information. And it's not just the data you give them, it's the data they collect from algorithms which record our every move online and many of our moves off-line.
A series of anti-trust lawsuits has been laid against Facebook and Google in the US courts in a bid to stop their monopolistic behaviour and the Australian government has taken up the cudgels, too. Google's response has been to threaten to withdraw its service from Australia. Which rather sounds like - if we can't play football our way we'll take our ball home. Maybe the rest of the world needs to get some balls of its own!
Tobias Ellwood (chair of the Defence Select Committee) made these points in an article in The Mail on Sunday (7th February 2021) he also wrote:
"These firms assume we have become so dependent on them that they are irreplaceable, an essential part of life, like the air we breathe. This is not so."
"Meanwhile, we watch our high streets being emptied of shops that have been household names for generations, victims of internet retailers such as Amazon that pay derisory amounts of tax and whose physical presence is merely a few giant warehouse hubs."
"The internet's pioneers saw it as a way to share information free from Government control. How ironic that their creation has now been taken over by unaccountable corporations much bigger and more powerful than most countries."
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*For information: The company was Standard Oil and it made its owner, John Rockerfeller, wealthier than Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and google billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry page are today - combined.
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