DOJ has opened a comprehensive investigation into the business practices and models of big tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the likes many of whose stock I own. There have been persistent complaints about predatory practices by these companies. Are they predatory or just too successful much to the envy of the lil companies?
Link:
DOJ announces broad antitrust review of Big Tech, pushing down shares of Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon
Why? Nothing prevents me from using email services, search engines, or browsers other than Google. There are any number of email services (including spinning up your own server and paying 5 bucks for a domain name). There's Firefox, Edge, Explorer, Opera, Brave, Chromium, or any number of other browsers. For search you can use Duck-Duck-Go, Yahoo, Bing, Dogpile, Yippy, or spin up your own SearX instance. Nothing prevents me from ditching Macs and iPhones for Windows, any of the numerous Linux distros, or Andriod phones. Nothing prevents me from using services other than Facebook - you can use Friendica, Mastadon, Diaspora, Reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, Skype, Viber, Libe, Telegram, Signal, or any number of services provided by others or that you can spin up on your own.
For shopping, are you really limited to Amazon? Walmart offers the same services at comparable, if not lower, prices. Nothing requires or prohibits people from getting groceries, movies, books, and stuff from places other than Amazon. Nor are you limited to Amazon for cloud services. There's always Mircrosoft, Google, DigitalOcean, RedHat, VMWare, Rackspace, Oracle....or as always you can fairly easily provide your own cloud services from your own processing power and memory - it's pretty easy to do and fairly cheap - you can get 10TB and open source cloud s/w for your needs for a couple hundred bucks. .
I'm not persuaded that Big Tech is the threat people seem to think it is. I think that people are often too lazy or for some other reason don't feel compelled to look for any of these other options that are already available. Additionally, many of the complaints about big tech are for political purposes (YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook political/social "censorship" for example).
I don't see how Big Tech has any real capability to prevent market entry (competitive services of equal quality are already present) in any of the areas in which they operate. What it boils down to is that the consumer demands the existence of Big Tech, and so these centralized repositories for search, email, social media, and shopping exist. Consumers could quite easily change their minds and use other serverices available.
