On Monday 21 October, millions of people woke up to an outage of some of the world’s most popular online platforms. Social media services including Snapchat and Reddit, banks, and games like Fortnite were failing to connect users to their services.
The problem was a relatively routine one, a Domain Name System error, even if the scale wasn’t. The outage’s scale was so large because it originated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a massive US company that supports nearly one-third of the internet.
In my view, the outage exposes the folly of our over-reliance on monopolies. At best, should we decline to turn aside from a monopoly dependent future, outages like this will continue and only become more frequent. At worst, governments will fall under the sway of a few massive corporations.
It is indisputable that we already cede too much to monopolies. In the UK, two companies — Google and Facebook — control 80 per cent of the digital advertising market. The Big Five tech companies — Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — have bought out over 1,000 companies in the last two decades, squelching any possibility their death-grip on the industry might loosen and dampen creativity and innovation in the process.
In the US, in just ten years, 60 pharmaceutical companies consolidated into just ten firms. These statistics are the smallest chip of the vast iceberg of monopolization that we are sailing directly at. The modern world’s internet-dependent infrastructure will be increasingly susceptible to attacks by individuals, organizations, and sovereign countries seeking to sow discord and chaos for their own gain. If cyberwarfare is the future of global conflict, outages like the one earlier this week will become more common and more disruptive. On top of that, I believe monopolies of all sorts, controlled by wealthy, and out of touch executives, immune to the concerns of most of the population, are unlikely to cede their power back to workers and lower prices to ease the cost of living crisis.
But outages and sky-high prices are, unfortunately, the rosier future. The bleaker, alternative future comes about when and if we cede political control to monopolies, when we pass off the task of government to corporations and accept their ‘Terms and Conditions’ for our own existence. Some people might argue this latter future is upon us; the front-row presence of leaders from some of the world’s richest companies at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration is an ugly portent of a future where businesses rule the government.
There is still time to peacefully and democratically combat and break up monopolies, but our window of opportunity wanes. We can’t disregard Monday’s outage as a mere inconvenience. Monopolies are not benign, and we risk waiving our freedoms when we decline to break them up.
“Monopoly” by Mike_fleming is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Related
The Danger of Monopolies and Why we Need to Take Action
On Monday 21 October, millions of people woke up to an outage of some of the world’s most popular online platforms. Social media services including Snapchat and Reddit, banks, and games like Fortnite were failing to connect users to their services.
The problem was a relatively routine one, a Domain Name System error, even if the scale wasn’t. The outage’s scale was so large because it originated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a massive US company that supports nearly one-third of the internet.
In my view, the outage exposes the folly of our over-reliance on monopolies. At best, should we decline to turn aside from a monopoly dependent future, outages like this will continue and only become more frequent. At worst, governments will fall under the sway of a few massive corporations.
It is indisputable that we already cede too much to monopolies. In the UK, two companies — Google and Facebook — control 80 per cent of the digital advertising market. The Big Five tech companies — Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — have bought out over 1,000 companies in the last two decades, squelching any possibility their death-grip on the industry might loosen and dampen creativity and innovation in the process.
In the US, in just ten years, 60 pharmaceutical companies consolidated into just ten firms. These statistics are the smallest chip of the vast iceberg of monopolization that we are sailing directly at. The modern world’s internet-dependent infrastructure will be increasingly susceptible to attacks by individuals, organizations, and sovereign countries seeking to sow discord and chaos for their own gain. If cyberwarfare is the future of global conflict, outages like the one earlier this week will become more common and more disruptive. On top of that, I believe monopolies of all sorts, controlled by wealthy, and out of touch executives, immune to the concerns of most of the population, are unlikely to cede their power back to workers and lower prices to ease the cost of living crisis.
But outages and sky-high prices are, unfortunately, the rosier future. The bleaker, alternative future comes about when and if we cede political control to monopolies, when we pass off the task of government to corporations and accept their ‘Terms and Conditions’ for our own existence. Some people might argue this latter future is upon us; the front-row presence of leaders from some of the world’s richest companies at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration is an ugly portent of a future where businesses rule the government.
There is still time to peacefully and democratically combat and break up monopolies, but our window of opportunity wanes. We can’t disregard Monday’s outage as a mere inconvenience. Monopolies are not benign, and we risk waiving our freedoms when we decline to break them up.
“Monopoly” by Mike_fleming is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Share this:
Like this:
Related