Want to have a back-door installed to spy on users? Want to silence a problematic dissident? - Much easier to get it done in one place than in many. Especially if you can leverage the threat of 'breaking up a monopoly' if they don't want to comply...
There is little evidence this is a motivator for Western leaders. It’s certainly not explanatory for Europe or American states.
Your single point of control point is valid. But these conglomerates’ value to policymakers is broader than spying. Want to pass a tech-leadership package? There’s a ready provider. Deliver on social messaging goals, like diversity or free speech? Scaled provider there, too.
If you expect a monopoly/monoculture to promote diversity and free speech you will be sorely disappointed.
But on the monoculture point - doesn't the free market allow and reward diversity in areas people want it? You mention cashless society as an example.
That’s the fundamental advantage to many kinds of regulations, markets can’t convey unlimited information. We don’t want people constantly trying to decide where to eat based on the perceived risks of food born illness rather than price and how good the food tastes etc. By minimizing the risks of trying new restaurants you increase competition in other areas.
I’m not sure how you get a mono-culture in the way you’re describing without a monopoly. Google has a monopoly on search, end of story. They have over 90% marketshare worldwide.
Monopoly law is about leveraging your position as a big provider against competition.
Microsoft had as much market share in consumer OS. They didn't get in trouble for that. They got in trouble for killing Netscape by bundling IE and forcing Windows on all devices by charging per device sold regardless of whether Windows was installed or not. (Might have missed other suits but these are examples)
Government intervention to ensure competition rarely happens so maybe a new term to describe that would be good.
Quite willing to discuss them though!
Not sure Google enforces one way of being: there is Bing search instead of Google and iPhone instead of Android.
Cashless society is a different concept, but also you have Google Pay, Apple Pay, others. so still not a monopoly.
Cloud everything, not sure want you want different. Companies to have their own serves in their offices?
And Google paid Apple to make them the default search engine on iPhones!
To rewind back to the 90s: there was always an alternative to Internet Explorer. But MS was still punished for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
Thanks, would sincerely love you to discuss these things, and you can find (mine and others') attempts to connect those dots here on our podcast: https://cybershow.uk
There is a plethora of thriving communities and unfathomable amount of diversity and options.
Phone hardware are in most cases locked down, and even if they are not the bespoke hardware with terrible support is pretty much unusable. There are software alternatives but they are severely lacking and often lock you out of core features that even the most modest smartphone user expect to function. And that society expects you to be able to do.
Comparatively a PC is nirvana, I know apple is trying their darn best to change that but it is in a pretty good state.
The mindshare and actual usage is also several orders of magnitudes better.
I hope the US government feeling ready to take on Google is merely a symptom of a broader sea-change.
The problem is not one player like Google getting too big as a business. Monopolies naturally arise and get cut down, as often by markets than regulation.
The change is that we must challenge the very idea that it's acceptable for one way of being , whether technology, platform, protocol, or practice to become a de-facto norm - and radically exclude all others.
Mono-culture is in the crosshairs now, not monopoly.
And that applies to the enforced "cashless society", effectively mandated smartphone use, single strong identity systems , cloud everything and app everything, and so on...
Mono-cultures, whether in digital tech or banana crops, never end well. Lack of plurality is antithetical to long-term resilience and a healthy democracy and society.