Long story short, he says what's currently happening with the internet has happened before. New mediums follow "The Cycle", which means they progress from decentralized to centralized.
Amazon only covered 4% of US retail in 2017. I couldn't easily find the global figure, but it would obviously be much much smaller.
As for the overall idea, I think it depends on the time scale you look at. Compared to the late 20th century things do seem more consolidated now, but if you go back any further we're still probably in one of the most distributed modern economies ever.
Where did you get that statistic? Was that before the wholefoods acquisition? That seems very high to me, especially when you consider what retail covers. [1]
> I think it depends on the time scale you look at
Thinking about the time scales provides an interesting perspective. I think the core question is whether or not consolidation is a net positive or net negative for features we want in society (like innovation, freedom of choice, ability to self actualize, efficiency, productivity, etc). Even then it most likely depends on how we weight those feature priorities.
1. https://www.thebalance.com/us-retail-industry-overview-28926...
Of course it isn't. It happens to pretty much everything. Pareto's Principle in action. It's so frustrating that this happens but I see no way of fixing it.
I think that now this isn't an internet only phenomena. It seems its bleeding over into other markets as well. Amazon has already taken over much of retail, and even traditionally non tech companies (see Unilever or Pearson) have, through mergers, acquisitions, and other traditional business processes taken over massive portions of their respective markets.
This is just something, as a sideline observer I think could be happening, still chance observations, general stock market watching, and news articles are horrible guides for understanding what's really going on. Does anyone know what the research says? Do we have, in general, a convergence of markets into oligopolies dominated by a few big players like what's happened in much of the tech world?