Jakub Dlouhy The tech giants, as well-known Silicon Valley firms are often called, are becoming increasingly dominant and powerful. Companies like Google, Facebook or Apple hold too much power in their hands, which currently seems unbreakable. The creator of the site, Tim Berners-Lee, made a similar statement for the agency Reuters and stated that these companies may have to be weakened because of this. And he also outlined the circumstances under which this could happen.
"The digital revolution has spawned a handful of American technology firms since the 90s that now have more cultural and economic power than most sovereign nations," it is written in the introduction of the article about the statement of the founder of the Internet on Reuters.
Tim Berners-Lee, a 63-year-old scientist originally from London, invented the technology he later called the World Wide Web during his career at the CERN research center. However, the father of the Internet, as he is often called, is also known as one of its loudest critics. In the current form of the Internet, he is mainly bothered by the mishandling of personal data, related scandals and the spread of hatred through social networks. In his latest statement to Reuters, he said that the big technology companies may one day have to be limited or even destroyed due to their ever-growing power.
"Naturally, you end up with one dominant firm in the industry," said Tim Berners-Lee in an interview, "so historically you have no choice but to just go in and break things."
In addition to the criticism, Lee also mentioned potential factors that could save the world from a situation where it would really be necessary to clip the wings of the technological giants in the future. According to him, today's innovations are moving forward so quickly that over time new players may appear who will gradually take away the power of established companies. In addition, in today's fast-changing world, it can happen that the market completely changes and interest shifts from technology companies to another area.
The five Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook have a market capitalization of $3,7 trillion, which is comparable to the gross domestic product of all of Germany. The father of the Internet warns against the enormous power of a few companies with such a radical statement. However, the aforementioned article does not state how his idea of disrupting technology companies could be realistically implemented.
