The tide is starting to turn against the world’s digital giants. By John Naughton
In his wonderful
book The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, the literary
historian Stephen Greenblatt traces the origins of the Renaissance back to the rediscovery
of a 2,000-year-old poem by Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of
Things). The book is a riveting explanation of how a huge cultural shift can
ultimately spring from faint stirrings in the undergrowth.
Professor Greenblatt
is probably not interested in the giant corporations that now dominate our
world, but I am, and in the spirit of The Swerve I’ve been
looking for signs that big changes might be on the way. You don’t have to dig
very deep to find them. Some are pretty
obvious. In 2014, for example, the European Court of Justice decided that EU
citizens had the so-called “right
to be forgotten” and that Google would have to comply if it wanted to
continue to do business in Europe. In May this year, the European
commission fined Facebook €110m for “providing misleading information”
about its takeover of WhatsApp. And in June the commission levied a
whopping €2.4bn fine on Google for abusing its monopoly in search.
Since the European
commission is the only regulator in the world that seems to have the
muscle and inclination to take on the internet giants, these developments were
relatively predictable. What’s more interesting are various straws in the wind
that show how digital behemoths are losing their shine.
Many of these relate to
Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and to the dawning of a realisation
that Google and Facebook in particular may have played some role in these
political earthquakes.
This was not because
the leadership of the two companies actively sought these outcomes, but because
people began to realise that the infrastructure they had built for their core
business of extracting users’ data and selling it to companies for ad-targeting
purposes could be – and was – “weaponised” by political actors in order to achieve
political goals… read more:
