Companies like Google and Amazon are not showing any signs of slowing down when it comes to growth, leading to the idea that they will become too big to be controlled.
This “fear” sounds logic considering that we are talking about companies that have as main purpose to offer quick solutions to many aspects of the modern human life.
According to USA Today, only Amazon sells over half of the books sold in the United States, has a 45% market share in cloud computing, while Google has a market share of more than 80% of the search engine market and can control and see almost everything published online, writes Futurism.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen spoke about these fears at the Global Antitrust Enforcement Symposium in Washington on September 12, stating that “we are heading towards a dystopian future where some big technology companies will have full control over our economic life”.
However, Ohlhausen also brings a counter-argument, saying that market dominance requires more than a high market share.
It also adds that, companies such as Amazon and Google continue to grow because they are mainly focuses on the consumer’s welfare.
Meanwhile, groups such as the New America Foundation have repeatedly criticized Amazon for eschewing regulations.
Lina Khan, a member of Open Markets, said that “Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, has created a map of antitrust laws to determine the best ways to avoid them – antitrust laws are a set of federal and governmental laws of the United States to regulate the organization and behavior of corporations, to ensure honest competition for the benefit of the consumer”.
What would happen with these big companies it’s still a mystery, but one thing is sure: their massive growth over the past decades does not show signs of slowing.