The Internet is an integral part of our society in the 21st Century. You’re using it right now to read my pithy little words. Many of us use it for shopping — I just got an order from Amazon that would have required me to chase around several different stores to find everything (using a lot of gasoline in the process), and no guarantee I could have tracked everything down. This morning I was chatting on Discord with friends from the US to Canada to the UK and even a couple in the Netherlands and India, discussing everything from our favorite game to the political climate in our various countries and commiserating over bruised knees and egos from a fall on the ice (Canada may thaw out by say, August). My beloved Mr. Scribe is a train/transit enthusiast and has discovered a treasure trove of videos from the perspective of NYC subway train cabs. The Internet informs us, it entertains us, it supplies us.
But while it does all that, it also to a certain extent controls us. Many tech companies are involved in many parts of our daily life. Google went from a search engine to a giant company that provides a myriad of services with a single login. Facebook started out as a way to stay in touch with college classmates to the current behemoth keep track of all our lives. Amazon transitioned from a way to buy stuff into offering Web services, getting into the grocery business (Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, etc.). In the process they gobble up smaller independent companies that have innovative technology; Google bought up YouTube, Facebook now owns Instagram. And while Amazon doesn’t directly own Twitch, they’ve got a pretty close partnership.
Are these companies getting a bit too big for their britches? One candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination thinks so.
This morning on Morning Joe (Joe was off but Mika was still there) Elizabeth Warren was discussing many issues: the Warren Mueller investigation, North Korea and others. I was asleep for most of the discussion but I woke up in time to listen to the final segment, her thoughts about MegaTech like Facebook/Google/Amazon and probably a bunch of other Big Names she’s not mentioning yet.
I know the next President will have a lot on her/his plate, cleaning up after 4 years of GOP mismanagement especially the current Oval Office Occupant. S/he will have to repair our broken relationships with our allies, end the disastrous trade wars, work with Congress to find workable solutions for catastrophic climate change, immigration crisis, our broken election systems and so much more. I will be interested to see if any of the other candidates follow her lead on this issue, perhaps as part of a national cybersecurity project to ensure that our systems are as secure as possible if people take proper precautions. A security glitch leaving thousands of average Americans open to malicious action is a far bigger risk to national security than what’s going on at the southern border that requires a stupid wall.