How to Build an Idea on a Platform

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We cannot compare the so called take giants to the monopolies which provided water, gas, electricity. Would you like to have two telephone lines coming into your house, or two different gas pipes from two different gas companies? These are natural monopolies. It's more efficient for one supplier to supply you. There is competition on both sides of the market. In the instances where there has been a break up, we had a one sided market, you had a seller and you had buyers. And the tech companies are the platform that bring the two sides together. So breaking them up would be much more complicated than breaking up in any other industry.

With so much data and power centralised in the hands of a few West Coast companies, the tech giants have become a serious threat to our basic freedoms and must be broken up. That’s the argument that was made at this major Intelligence Squared debate by the FT’s global business columnist Rana Foroohar and by businessman and former chairman of Channel 4 Luke Johnson. But others would argue that it’s all too easy to make the tech giants a scapegoat for the inevitable upheavals caused by the digital revolution. The real winners of this revolution are not the tech companies but us, the users. Who could now imagine living without the services of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft? That’s the case that was made in our debate by former head of Facebook’s European politics and government division Elizabeth Linder and competition law expert Pinar Akman. Who's right and who's wrong?

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