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Created: 2025-03-07
This, by the way, is the main reason why so much of Silicon Valley has decided to embrace the candidacy of former President Donald Trump. It isn’t that tech leaders necessarily love incompetent authoritarians. It isn’t because they believe any of his promises. It’s that they have spent 3.5 years facing Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and they cannot handle answering to a competent regulator anymore.
Google commands 90 percent of the search market. Seven in ten of all Americans use Facebook. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control two-thirds of the internet’s cloud architecture — if any of it goes down, so does the web. Amazon owns 40 percent of the American e-commerce market.
What’s happening now, in one sense, is that the tech titans who have secured such large swaths of power over the digital world, are increasingly comfortable wielding that power, openly, in the ‘real’ world too; the tech oligarchs are becoming the American oligarchs, period, often using leverage from their digital platforms in tandem with their war chests of old-fashioned cash.
The problem is not the political and scientific positions of these billionaires. The problem is that they are establishing an oligarchy in which great wealth also ensures great power. The guardrails that used to protect us and inhibit such oligarchical tendencies in the U.S. are degrading fast.