Governments around the world rallying against tech titans – An epic battle awaits

LONDON — There is no doubt about it, the tech titans, some may call them nerds or geeks are now ruling the world. They pay taxes where they like and in many cases as little as the most remote island or country keen for their business would allow them to. The Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates of this new tech world top the list of the world's super rich and with their power and money they can think and dream big, bigger than the earth in many cases. The access that all of us have to a tech world makes our lives so much easier but it means that we all give away so much details of our lives and many technology companies build their revenue models on sharing our private details with their advertisers. In the UK, the dominance of Amazon and Google has meant that many high street shops, some of which have served customers for hundreds of years, went out of business. But a sea change is coming, a new wave by governments around the world trying to clamp down on the negative influence of the tech titans. Irked by the small percentage that Google, Facebook and Apple are paying in taxes, pressurised by local companies and with increased awareness of how the advertising models of the tech giants is impeding on people's privacy with added assaults on Western democracies by trolls from hostile countries; governments are moving in to regulate or break up the tech titans. It is going to be an epic battle because the tech giants have big pockets and big influence on many of the politicians who have to decide on their future. – Linda van Tilburg

By Thulasizwe Sithole

Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of the Democrat hopefuls hoping to break the Trump strangle-hold on the White House and she has come out guns blazing against the tech giants in the run-up to her quest to become America's next President. Rejecting accusations that her proposal to break up the largest technology companies in the United States, Amazon.com, Alphabet's Google and Facebook is socialist, she says she remains a capitalist who believes in markets that work in a level playing field.

The Massachusetts senator suggests that the United State should adopt legislation that would reclassify the tech giants as platform utilities which are regulated and all of these "platform utilities" with revenue of more than $25bn would be prevented from owning the other apps on their platform. Her drive would break up technology mergers like Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods and Zappos, WhatsApp and Instagram ownership by Facebook and Google's deals with Waze, Nest and Double Click.

It is not the only country where politicians are gearing up to take on the tech giants. In the United Kingdom Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond is expecting to respond in his Spring Statement to a report by a Harvard University professor, Jason Furnam and other experts who called for a web watchdog in the UK. Their 150-page report warned that that existing competition rules are not fit for the digital age and are calling for an inquiry into the advertising revenue streams of Google and Facebook. The experts, who found that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft acquired more than 400 companies over the last decade are also calling for a new unit to be set up in the Competition and Markets Authority to police technology firms operating in the UK. The panel however refrained from calling for the big tech companies to be broken up as proposed by Elizabeth Warren.

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