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NYT op-ed: digital giants Google, Facebook are the new monopolies

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Last week in a Senate subcommittee hearing, Internet entrepreneur and reality-TV star Mark Cuban argued that “Facebook is without question in a dominant position” for content delivery and that digital giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon have too much influence over consumers’ content decisions.

“As a Facebook user I don’t get to pick what content I get to see in my newsfeed. I can try to influence it, but Facebook algorithms control what I see,” Cuban said. “As much of a geek as I am, I like having the choice of searching through a programming guide to see what’s on rather than an algorithm telling me what I should watch. I think a lot of consumers would like to see that choice continue as well.”

Now Jonathan Taplin, professor of communication at the University of Southern California and author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy,” is adding detail to Cuban’s general claims. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Taplin argues that Google, Facebook, and other digital giants are the new monopolies, relying on some frightening statistics, such as:

  • Google “has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market.”

  • “In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley.”

  • “Google’s YouTube has an over 55 percent market share in the streaming audio business and yet provides less than 11 percent of the streaming audio revenues to the content owners and creators.”

  • “The former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, estimated that Facebook had ‘sucked up $27 million’ of the paper’s projected digital advertising revenue in the last year by essentially keeping Guardian readers on Facebook, rather than linking them to the Guardian site.”

There are more troubling details about how digital companies make their money, of course – how they fail to pay content creators; how they control consumers’ choices, as Cuban noted; and how they collect and sell personal details of their users.

At last week’s hearing, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the ranking Democrat on the antitrust subcommittee, suggested a hearing that probes Google, Facebook, and others. We agree – hearings to question the digital giants on these details are overdue.

Read the entire NYT piece here.

 

Links:

Senators probe AT&T-Time Warner deal (Speed Matters, Dec. 12, 2016)

Forget AT&T. The Real Monopolies Are Google and Facebook. (New York Times, Dec. 13, 2016)