Four corporate behemoths dominate our economy, writes Ross Barkan. It is time to break them up and foster healthy competition. Progressives met that challenge over a century ago. Have the Big Four become too big to fail and too powerful to regulate?
”Four corporations dominate American life. They have the wealth of nations. They have generated unfathomable revenue, created a number of jobs, and decimated many more. Their control of the economy is total.
“They are Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Unless we do something, their power will remain limitless.
“Any Democrat running for president who claims to be a progressive should put trust-busting at the top of their agenda. Socialist or capitalist, big government or small, the priority should be the same: to ensure the people who consume goods and create goods are not exploited.
“All four corporate behemoths are too large. These monopolies fuel staggering inequality and stifle the kind of economic growth that used to be more evenly distributed. Profits are immense and gains for actual workers are small – these corporations do not generate employment, let alone unionized employment, on the scale of earlier revolutionary giants.”
Will any candidate step up to the challenge? Will candidates from both parties court the 1% for campaign contributions in exchange for protecting them from taxation and regulation?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We need a platoon of trustbusters, not only to break up Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook but also the banks too big to fail, the media conglomerates such as Sinclair, and the hedge fund empires.
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I’d put Monsanto which plans to merge with Bayer on that list too. It is a toxic behemoth.
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I’d add Walmart, Kroger, Wallgreen’s, CVS, and the major drug makers.
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This problem goes beyond the dangers of corporate monopolies. Amazon has a $600 million contract with the CIA and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post one of the very influential U.S. newspapers. How much of our personal information have Apple, Facebook, and Google turned over to the NSA?
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We also need to break up the big banks, big oil , big broadcasting including non public companies to restore some semblance of normality’s.
Sent from my iPad
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Yes. Add Comcast, AT&T, Verizon.
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Airlines.
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Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest humans of all time and this is how he treats his workers: Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK ‘peed in bottles’ over fears of being punished for taking a break
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles-2018-4
Doesn’t Bezos fancy himself to be a philanthropist? He Jeff, start with your own workers, you megalomaniac!
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I recently read the average salary at Amazon is $22,000 per year.
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To the guillotines!
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Bezos is a megalomaniac.
Amazon is a HORRID place to work.
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A fascinating read in which Mr. Barkan has touched on issues central to our democracy and its continuance. The books ‘How Democracies Die,’ and ‘Democracy in Chains,’ – by Levitsky/Ziblatt and Nancy MacLean respectively – speak of our democracy being in trouble. Information is necessary in order for the electorate to vote well, and hopefully this kind of discourse reaches the person on the street. Whatever besets us has taken time and will need some time for us to elevate ourselves out of it. We must work with might and main to get political representatives who truly represent us.
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The problem is that there’s nothing wrong, from an antitrust perspective, with being big. Google dominates search, and Amazon dominates book sales. So those companies are probably monopolists in those markets. There would be an antitrust problem if there were evidence that they were using their monopoly power to increase prices. More likely it’s the opposite. When we talk about the costs imposed by Google and Amazon, we’re usually not talking about consumer costs. We’re talking about costs of lost jobs, low wages, bad working conditions, and lost privacy. But antitrust cares only about damage to competition, as manifested by the costs of products paid by consumers.
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Net neutrality would have made competition for consumers fair, but a corporate takeover of the FCC was executed. The costs to consumers today are measured in the forcing of the consumer to give monetarily valuable data to a monopoly without a fair option. The product is the consumer.
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Sorry, I didn’t mean net neutrality would make competition fair, but that it would make it fairer.
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Net neutrality, as I understand it, is a very good thing. Add it to the list of good things destroyed by the Trump administration.
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InService, net neutrality was a good thing. Add it to the long list of good things destroyed by the Trump administration.
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Just read that the Trump administration plans to roll back civil rights protections for transgender people. Who’s next?
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Everyone not in the yacht club and everything not nailed down. That includes the Constitution.
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Are their laws against a big monopoly reducing prices and taking a loss until they have driven the rest of their competitors out of business?
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Good thought. That’s Walmart’s model. Walmart blackmail’s their suppliers & outside contractors to sell low or Walmart will cut them off. Low wages & abuses to workers trickles down their supply chain.
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Donald Trump stunned both parties with his 2016 win, after running on a promise to go after Wall St. It was obvious after just a few days in office in January, 2017, however, that he would do just the opposite. All those people left down and out by the rise of wealth concentration were let down by Trump as they had been by Obama, Bush, and Clinton, and they remain that way.
There is a desire among the majority to keep Social Security. There is a desire to keep public education. There is a desire to keep big money out of democratic elections. There is a desire for a president of the people, a strong progressive. Elizabeth Warren has a strong, progressive plan: stop allowing mergers; crack down on no-poaching agreements to allow hiring competition; get all agencies like the FCC, the DoJ, the FDA, the defense department and so on to enforce rules of competition; and break up Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook by regulating them like the public utilities they really have become.
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The future that was predicted in “Brave New World”, “1984”, “Fahrenheit 441” is coming true. The whole world will be run by huge corporations, they will conduct wars to regulate commerce and profits.
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Don’t forget “Rollerball” (1975). One(1) corporation runs the whole world.
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And who could forget RAMJAC, a Vonnegut creation.
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In the meantime where are we actually heading.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/apr/20/world-bank-fewer-regulations-protecting-workers
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SCARY. Just trying to keep up with SCAM artists is enough for me. These DAZE … protecting oneself from SCAMs is a FULL-TIME job.
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In 2016, Amazon, Apple, Deep Mind (part of Google’s Alphabet), Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft established the “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.”
This non-profit began as a PR campaign, designed to put a positive spin on AI in the face of increasing public and press disapproval… of data mining and the use of algorithms to drive online behavior (e.g. Facebook’’s profit-seeking from Russian operatives who interfered with our elections). The stated mission: Harness AI for solutions to some of humanity’s most challenging problems. What Problems?
The list of problems identified (paragraph 4) are: education, climate change, food, health and well being, transportation, and inequality. See Introduction From The Founding Co-Chairs paragraph 4, https://www.partnershiponai.org/introduction/
Since the founding, Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society has acquired many partners–for-proft, and non-profits, including universities.
Among the are (as of March 2018) for-profits: Acenture (Re-Invented after Enron); Affectiva (Emotion Recognition Tech); Cogitai, Inc., collaborates with Sony); Ebay; Element AI (Canada); Intel; McKinsey & Company; Nvidia’s -Invented GPU in 1999, Acting As The Brain Of Computers “That Can Perceive And Understand The World;” Salesforce (Cloud Computing, Einstein AI); SAP (Predictive Analytics); Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc; Zalando Technology (Germany, Ireland, Finland).
These are the universities: The AI Now Institute at New York University; Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University; Leverhulme Centre for The Future Of Intelligence (University Of Cambridge, UK); The Future of Humanity Institute, (University Of Oxford, UK); Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering; Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University; Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford, UK); Tufts University Human-Robot Lab; University College London, Engineering (UK); University Of Washington Tech Policy Lab.
These are other non-profits: The Association For The Advancement Of Artificial Intelligence; American Civil Liberties Union; The Artificial Intelligence Forum Of New Zealand; The (Paul) Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence (AI2); Amnesty International; Article 19 (Freedom To Speak And Know); Association For Computing Machinery; Center For Democracy & Technology; Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence; Center For Democracy & Technology; Centre for Internet and Society, India Centre for Internet & Society; Data & Society; The Digital Asia Hub; Doteveryone (London Think Tank); The Electronic Frontier Foundation: The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (Germany); Future Of Life Institute; The Future Of Privacy Forum; The Hastings Center (NY, bioethics); Human Rights Watch, Omidyar Network (Ebay Founder, SIB investments); OpenAI; UNICEF’s Office of Innovation; Upturn; XPRIZE (Google Lunar XPRIZE, NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, Global Learning XPRIZE (go to, https://learning.xprize.org/teams); Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE); IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, Water Abundance XPRIZE, Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE).
The Partnership is setting up working groups and will be meeting in Berlin. The Newly appointed CEO of the Partnership has some experience in the White House. She is tech savvy.
I have a hard time thinking about the “partnership” that can be formed between mega-corporations in tech, especially artificial intelligence, all organized to make profits and the many non-profits that have signed on, some clearly with track records of whistle-blowing. The universities are likely to be grooming the next generation of computing engineers. It is good to see that some of these programs are addressing policy, this, and implications beyond grooming next generation profit-seekers. https://www.partnershiponai.org/2017/10/executive-director-new-partners/
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Just to be clear, Diane, are you passing along the suggestion to break up these four companies? Or are you endorsing that recommendation?
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I endorse breaking up monopolies.
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Do you regard each of the 4 companies mentioned as a monopoly that should be broken up?
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How many people can still remember one telephone company? Three television networks? etc.
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I do.
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AGREE!
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Just to be clear, Joe, yes.
I hope there is a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt who understands that concentrated power and vast wealth in the hands of the few endanger democracy.
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You have that right! Agreed x 1,000!!!
Too much power, too much wealth, and too much monopoly = very little real competition.
However, this concept does NOT work well with public schools, which ought to guarantee excellence and resources to all children regardless of their SES.
Let’s please not conflate “monopoly” of the free and open market with what many have accused the public schools of holding. They are NOT at all the same. There are certain components in society that HAVE to be guaranteed, and leaving it to competition to provide that guarantee, instead of government and collectivism, is a vile and immoral practice.
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Diane, I did not mean that YOU were conflating the two. I meant this in general to anyone, especially reformers. Sometimes my clarity is an issue probably because English is not my first language. So frustrating, especially when I don’t reread and edit.
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I didn’t think so. Not to worry.
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Even if companies like Google, Amazon and Fakebook had much less wealth, they would still be a threat to democracy because of all the information they collect about people.
They should be downsized AND also probably regulated as public utilities.
It’s another case of companies that profit greatly from public R&d and infrastructure (their very existence can be attributed to public investment) and don’t pay anywhere near what they should in taxes. In fact, until the recent Trump tax breaks, Google and others were offshoring their money to avoid paying income taxes.
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AMEN, Some DAM Poet. Never forget! They ALL did USE PUBLIC INVESTMENTS and didn’t do much of anything, except become famous for using others’ talents.
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So Microsoft got left behind by these 4?
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Stacked ranking killed Microsoft. It never recovered from having a poor business model.
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And stacked ranking is literally killing employees at Amazon, too. Bezos is no genius, but he is GREEDY and ARROGANT.
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