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The following article is an extract from Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles – and All of Us by Rana Foroohar

It’s no secret that the concentration of market power has been rising in numerous industries over the past few decades, a trend that has been linked to everything from growing income inequality to slower economic growth to a surge in political populism.

[Over] 80 percent of corporate wealth [is] now being held by just about 10 percent of companies. And these [aren’t] the firms that [own] the most physical assets or commodities […]. Rather, they [are] those that [have] figured out how to leverage the new “oil” of our economy – information and networks. Many of these new superstars [are] technology companies. The tech industry provides the starkest illustration of the rise in monopolistic power in the world today.

[This] raises the question: How did we get here? How did an industry that had once been scrappy, innovative, and optimistic become, in the span of just a few decades insular, and out of touch with society? How did we get from a world where “information wants to be free” to one in which data exists to be monetized? How did a movement built on the goal of democratising information come to be such a threat to the very fabric of our democracy? And how did its leaders go from tinkering with motherboards in their basements to dominating our political economy?

This OECD article is available in full from:
https://www.oecd-forum.org/users/42292-rana-foroohar/posts/don-t-be-evil-how-big-tech-betrayed-its-founding-principles-and-all-of-us-by-rana-foroohar