I'm sure you've been hearing the ever more anguished calls to regulate the huge tech

firms known collectively as GAFA, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

These companies, these super large platform monopolists, they have developed the capacity

to manipulate us, to control us, to control the information that is delivered to us, to

control the pricing at which products are delivered to us, to control us as producers.

The GAFA companies are far bigger, richer, and arguably more dominant than tech companies

in the past.

Google, for instance, has more than 80% of global search engine market share.

Facebook has nearly 2 billion monthly active users.

Amazon has an estimated 90 million prime members in the US that's something like 70% of

all American households.

It's estimated that 40% of all online spending goes to Amazon.

This kind of scale creates a lot of concern.

We've examined this concern in previous episodes like who runs the internet and is the internet

being ruined.

We're seeing the birth of a new center of power, real power.

We depend on these technologies that have been in many ways wonderful and fascinating,

but they're making significant decisions laterally.

There's also the question of whether the mission of these firms is as socially beneficial as

many people believe they were in the early days of the internet.

There's all these really smart engineers.

They're the brightest computer scientists, and all they're thinking about is, how do I

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