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2018-09-06

Amazon $AMZN Joins $Trillion Club & How To Tame Tech Giants (video)

1) Amazon $AMZN & $Trillion Club

Amazon $AMZN has doubled in market value in just a year and joined Apple $AAPL Tuesday by reaching (briefly) the elite ranks of companies worth at least $1 trillion in market capitalization. CNN.com video above published Sep 4, 2018.

$AAPL
$AMZN
$GOOGL
$MSFT
Who's next? Google $GOOG $GOOGL or Microsoft $MSFT?
source: statista.com
How To Tame The Tech Giants

The Economist.com video above published Sep 4, 2018: Google, Facebook and Amazon are among the biggest companies in the world. Their dominance is also worrying for consumers and competitors.

How many can imagine life without Google, Facebook or Amazon? Chances are you're using one or more of the tech giants' services daily.. These companies have transformed how we buy goods online and consume information online. But there is a growing view that the big web platforms need to be reined in.
  • Google handles up to 90% of all web searches in many countries which gives it unprecedented access to personal data.
  • Facebook connects over 2 billion users or a quarter of the world's population. 
  • Together, the Google and Facebook duopoly dominate online advertising, which is also how they make most of their money since their services, for the most part, are free. 
  • Amazon accounts for over 40 percent of all ecommerce sales in America and has large market shares elsewhere, which allows Amazon to dictate terms to suppliers.
Of course, the companies are also innovative, dynamic, and bring a lot of value to consumers, but at the same time, their size brings worries. Today's major tech companies are among the largest firms in the world. A little over a decade ago they barely made the list. Critics worry that they're BAAD - that's big, anti-competitive, addictive and destructive to democracy.

Being big, per se, isn't illegal but anti-competitive worries are real and Google has been fined by European regulators for favoring its own apps, while Facebook has bought up startups that could have competed against it.

The market share of each of these tech giants is as large as industrial giants of the past when regulators broke them up or treated them as utilities.

The video above suggests various approaches: First, regulators should scrutinize even small mergers for potentially anti-competitive effects, to prevent the tech giants from buying up firms that could become rivals. Second,  regulators should consider giving individuals rights over their data and potentially require the tech platforms to share data to encourage competition.

See also: Amazon is expected to take almost 50 percent of the U.S. e-commerce market by year's end--CNBC.com.

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