Who Controls the Internet?
by Walter Frick
From the Magazine (June 2016)
But what if the decentralized model that Greenstein outlines is going away? After all, today’s internet is clearly dominated by what Farhad Manjoo, of the New York Times, calls the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google (now a unit of Alphabet), and Microsoft. Might these incumbents be more inclined and better positioned than past giants to defend their turf and maintain centralized control?
For one thing, they own much of the technology deemed critical to the next wave. Facebook has acquired one of the leading virtual reality firms, Oculus. Alphabet has absorbed seven separate robotics companies along with DeepMind, the artificial intelligence outfit that recently established a milestone by beating a world champion at the game Go. Amazon and Alphabet are both experimenting with drone delivery, and, of course, Alphabet is developing a self-driving car.
Data is another advantage. TheFrightful Fivehave vast amounts, which is exactly what you need to build machine-learning applications. Because they’ve been in business (and collecting information on their many customers) for years, they have a dramatic, perhaps insurmountable, head start in this area. As Ross asks, “Will big data serve to centralize businesses, pulling more industries into the gravitational field of Silicon Valley?”
Case places his faith in entrepreneurs and their record of displacing incumbents. After all, AOL survived Microsoft’s attacks during his tenure; perhaps today’s start-ups can do the same against the Frightful Five. But, as he admits, AOL’s disastrous merger with Time Warner was precipitated by public policy decisions that denied “open access,” allowing cable companies to discriminate against content providers. “If we couldn’t partner with a cable company, the thinking went, maybe we needed to buy one,” Case writes.
That’s just one example of how easily the scales can be tipped away from decentralized control. Greenstein cites another—antitrust law—noting that although the breakup of AT&T furthered technological development, today’s rules are narrowly focused on how competition affects consumer prices rather than on the need for multiple perspectives in the innovation process.
It would be a stretch to call Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Satya Nadella the “manager of the internet.” But the companies these people lead do represent a centralization of power, and each of them will have a disproportionate say in the network’s future. Although the potential for innovation from the edges still exists, it’s not inevitable.
https://hbr.org/2016/06/who-controls-the-internet