Aoel and yah failed because they could not keep up with the pace of innovation. Gugo, amazon, facebook and others can also fail if they fall into the same trap. In fast moving technology markets, no company is too big to fail. No one is irreplaceable. And it is that existential threat, the thread of competition from those more inevitive and better than themselves, that keeps these tech giants on their toes.
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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