Given the heights and cool and facebook and others recently. You normally have a pretty broad stroke to your coverage. Why this book and right now . Thank you for having me, by the by. I started this book in 2017 i had just taken a job as a columnist for the financial times, trying to figure out the worlds biggest business and economic stories and an opinion form, and for the final, i started looking through corporate figures. I saw amazing numbers in the Financial Sector to the technology sector. Run the numbers that really stuck out was a Mckinsey Global institute figure, looking at 80 corporate wealth was in just 10 . Because of the firms richest in personal data and intellectual property. Basically, if your trafficking in these things, were holding the majority of the world corporate wealth. The biggest were the ones like facebook, apple, amazon, netflix a little bit and googled most about. Theres some overlap, facebook and google, apple mostly shunned advertising and third devices and technology, you uber you mentioned wasnt either but its a whole different basis. Besides the fact that we think of them as being tech, they all have one thing in common. Thats a great question. Right now they are off trying to separate each other as regulators work more tightly in the space. The things they do all have in common is the network effect. It something to talk about a lot in my book. As you get big, you get bigger. The Business Model of these companies and many unicorns in Silicon Valley, the giant firms is to bring in as much territory as quickly as possible. So you get an and in many cases, you get invite margin. A company like amazon and uber, to undercut the world Taxi Services and take over the entire industry and worry about profits labor. Businesses simply havent been able to do this at scale until now. That has a lot of ramifications. It cuts competitors out and waste their competitive in price of monopoly power. Google a regional, very optimistic and composite statement about itself, what it was going to adhere to. The implication is if not peop people, they have that. So whats bad about being big and powerful and successful . Wow. Where to start . [laughter] i wrote 350 pages on it. It was a mantra the google guys came up with but in the mid 90s, when the internet was a garage industry, it was just being born. You have these individual smalltime entrepreneurs coming up with companies and the reason i decided to focus on google and this idea of not being able is cool was there in the beginning. When you write a book, particularly a, gated book on social issues, want to try to find a continuous narrative. At the time i started looking at this, the company in the news for election many ablation and off those, monopoly power, bad behavior in general, if you go back and look at google and its founding, i read a paper that the founders of google wrote in 1998. It looks at what is the Search Engine . How would you run the Search Engine . How would you pay for the Search Engine . At the very end, they have a paragraph on advertising and they talk about how targeted advertising, which is the Business Model of essentially watching what you are doing online, following you around, seeing what youre clicking on, what are you searching . Building a digital food to all of you and showing that to advertisers and auctioning your eyeballs off to the higher bidder, its that Business Model and it would eventually bring users and advertisers into conflict. Their interest would not be the camp same. Large entities like russia or iran or White Nationalist or whoever might want to reach you so this was amazing to me. This is one of the things that bugs me when i see ceos get up on the hill and say we are so sorry we could never have imagined all these terrible things. Well, go back to that paper in 1998. It was kind of author in small print. In the statement of the evil, was microsoft. The mid to late 90s, they were seen as this evil empire, stepped on apple with windows storming into the internet and trying to own everything, its odd now that bill gates is now this figure and technology, giving all this money away and why doesnt every billion or do what he does . This kind, gentle ceo, they dont come under too much fire or scrutiny. Its true. I didnt really focus on microsoft. I think if microsoft had their way, im sure they would be happy to have a successful Search Engine. Being is not that Search Engine. Every thank you are saying honed in on what constitutes monopoly power. The microsoft antitrust case which actually sort of allowed a lot of people would say, the space barr google to be born and grow. That happened over 20 years up to now. That was the last time regulators and the public really looked at Silicon Valley, took a hard look at the tech sector inside okay, we have habitation problems here. Microsoft spent so much time grabbing those issues being drawn into legal battles that google was able to get this wake up. Google was trafficking not in software but in data. Surveillance capitalism. At the whole new world. If you go to some of the books written about data economics, like the chief economist at google, the talk about the power of networks. In this new world, network of surveillance capitalism from these companies would become natural monopolies. They didnt want to get into the business unless they thought they could create monopoly. That, in a way, sort of comes in conflict early on. Its complicated, too though because while we talk about them as being monopolies and having monopoly power, they are all competing with each other. Thats what they would argue. Amazon is in the lead in microsoft think the calendar. Smart phones, apple is in the lead. Google is not weed if youre counting operating systems. Look how much competition there is. Theres so much wrong with the argument. An early conversation i had with google when i started thinking about this book, i met with other strategy folks and put forward my idea that hey, your natural monopolist. She looked very surprised and said well, we feel like we are competing against big guys. Its goliath and goliath at this time. You have a handful of players, basically three of our companies. I have taken over everything and are actually moving into entirely new fields. In the last few months, whats happening on apple, amazon, google in areas like healthcare finance, we seen amazon go overnight into the grocery business. Its hard to think of the business that couldnt be disrupted. By the giant firms. That might beg the question, why havent you seen other Major Industries saying hey, we need a monopoly case, its a very fast hand bargain because they benefit, every company in the world benefits from the power of targeted advertising. Theyre all using it. The model that has been pioneered by these businesses, harvesting our personal data for free, imagine if gm got all of it for free. They would have doubledigit profit markets, too. Summing it, correlating it across devices and industries, look at some of the privacy and security and monopoly issues like facebook, think about adding Checking Account on that and healthcare under that and then smart speakers and how the surveillance is all around us now. Its not just online, its an hour smart phone. My husband loves echo and he keeps it in his office. I insist he turns it off every time i go in there. I cannot imagine, of the political moment we live in, i do not want a surveillance device in my house. Lets talk about the idea and fill me in on the details here. The idea that by watching the people, by collecting the data and what people are doing, you can know the whole Economic System that doesnt necessarily benefit from. Not necessarily the consumer but the good. This is a wonderful book, everyone should read it, she looks in a very academic way, almost through marxist lines. The history of capitalism and how this new kind of surveillance capitalism is in some ways, the ultimate fruition of corrupting society or citizen into a consumer and now turning a consumer, a person into a rock material. As we are calling around online, digital patterns are developed. We get none of that resource. My shopping patterns, the fact that i have an issue with some fine jews, thats my desire, thats my habit and personal information. Thats my behavior. Its no longer mine, its being harvested by google and amazon and used to tell me more things. We have plenty of time to go into political but take what we have been talking about in terms of purchasing and corporate monopoly power and start to put that into the political area. One of the things that happens online, you get more of what you click on. Lets take you up on youtube and like my son in your clicking on lebron james videos all the time. He can give you any stat about the nba but if your clicking on hate speech, youre getting more of that. Thats called a filter bubble. That benefits these companies because they monetize us by keeping us online longer. This polarizes us politically and if you think about the power of these tech titans, Corporate Giants have always had political power. The robber barons, every ceo and every failure make it to a certain size what they by politicians, lobbying power but we have a new system in this world of surveillance without power comes not just from top down, we can get into how big tech is the artist lobby group but it comes from the bottom up. Our behavior can be many plated. These algorithms are better than we know ourselves. George, financier and political activist give a speech a couple of years ago, talking about do we even have free will in this world anymore . Are we really in danger of losing the kind of ability to really be free citizens in an open society in a world in which we can be controlled at this level. It sounds like some of your original questions are out the door. Right. You probably read another great book, getting all of this great promo for other peoples books but we are all in the same game here. An antitrust scholar did a book looking at some of these similarities but i do think this world of digital surveillance capitalism is fundamentally different. Its everywhere all the time. The services are like utilities. Can you imagine having ecommerce or uber apps pulled . Its a whole new world and we are only at the beginning of it because we talked about smart speakers, for example. The sales are going up exponentially three digits a year. That has more of a cognitive power. When you hear a suggestion given to you by voice, its even more powerful in terms of influencing your behavior and if you type in a search and go where google tells you to. Weve already seen and we are seen as more antitrust actions rolled out, the power of these companies what they can erase you as a product, as a person. If they want to. Its too much power. Apple ceo would probably say we are not the problem, we are part of the solution. We have this idea, this concept, differential privacy that we are building into our products. We are not sucking peoples actual identifying data out of the device and using that to inform a. I. We are shielding that and taking general insights and keeping ourselves, our own hands clean so we are not tracking in it. Is that true . I think its largely true but i think there are several holes in the argument. For starters, apple certainly has had more of a commitment to privacy, to be fair, for its own competitive advantage than google or facebook. Its not a data harvester in the same way google or facebook is. Those Companies Make 85 on digital advertising. Apple sells hardware, devices. It wants to create that network and create that ecosystem and loop you into buying as many apple products as possible. That way, it uses the network effect. For starters, apple privacy is buried, depending on what country you are talking about. Apple will complete julie on privacy in china in ways that it would not dream of doing in the u. S. It certainly subject to political pressure in the way Different Countries regular data and it wont stand up and fight beijing on these things. There are a couple of other problems with apple overlap the problems i see with google and facebook. Who gets part part of the innovation pipe . One of the big arguments right now when regulators say the companies are too big, we need to make them, bring them to heal and make them smaller maybe break them up. This is a battle between regulation and innovation. We have to stay big to innovate. I would argue that these companies is foremost among this are implement us. Not innovators. Implementers. They are implementers of pretty much other peoples technology. As a great start in the headlines, this google battle. With a small innovator, a guy came up with a way to make smart acres, they came up with a lot of technology that were adopted by both google and apple as the Company Started getting bigger and more powerful, they started infringing on the patents. They have taken apple to court over patent infringements. It couldnt afford to take on both google and apple over infringements. But apple has had major fights with other Big Companies. Apple is responsible much more selfinvolved way, the chinese chipmaker, there becoming the more go to chip company. Apple was on a three continent battle with the biggest innovator in the world. Infringing on its pattern. So these companies are implementing thousands of technologies, they want them to be inexpensive. They are, in some cases, legally taking opensource information there and in other cases infringing on patents. Sometimes they buy out Small Companies to get rid of competition. Again, its the big getting bigger and using a system for the innovation environment where theres some gain. You cant have an economy for Companies Taking all the luck. You have to have a bigger innovation ecosystem. They would have sued animal amazon, to put the couldnt afford them at the same time. Apple has been taken on by modify. Throw all the names and. And you argue phi its implication . The beginnings of apple, how could you have this just sitting here . That is one thing. Thats the allegation in some case but could one argue that the part of what companies and maybe even Big Companies become good at, is actually bringing that innovation into life . Into the economy and getting the people . A lot of people would argue that, i guess i would say i dont see a consumer electronic product that lets face it, Game Changing innovation since the smart phone in 2007. Everything else has been more or less iterative. Its been about apple being extremely clever as a marketer. As a brand creator. Value at this time lives in three places. Globally, in it and data and big brands. In real estate. Thats kind of where value flips. In a new world we are moving into, i think theres going to be an environment of deflation, monetization, qc apple fighting hard to keep market share. Look at apple losing a battle to a big chinese smart phone maker and a number of emerging markets. Apple success in being able to continue packing expensive products and selling them in tight glass boxes is not helping put more americans to work, its not helping to create the next big productive bubble. Things that would really bring along a Critical Mass of workers and bring our economy to the next big point. I would argue that our company, not a Perfect Company but that the company that came up with 5g chip. This is something that makes the smart phone smart. They are in the environment, having to duke it out just to stay alive. Three legal battles with other American Companies at the same time you have china rolling out one road, working seamlessly to institute chips and technology into an entirely new ecosystem. I think thats a model we should look much more carefully at then this laissezfaire game, keep margins as high as you can. Put jobs, products and outsource the supply chains wherever you want. We see in the last few weeks and months the number of corporate scandal, that Balance Sheet that has led to. I dont think it is leading to a good place. If we think about the different systems we are dealing with, the legacy in the u. S. Is very different from europe. For europe, its more about protecting competition. There its been more about protecting the consumer. It seems like in this digital era, that kind of distinction doesnt work the same way it used to because when we talk about facebook or google, very often the Companies Want to say look at the consumer. They are paying nothing. So this is good for the consumer. Other people say thats not the consumer. Its the advertiser, thats the consumer. They are paying a lot more than nothing. Thats the old model for antitrust and dealing with Big Companies and competition. Its the european model. It also needs to change. These are great questions. Two points i would make. One, the big tech giants, competition is just a click away. They are saying all the time well, lets go back to your question about microsoft, if you were doing a Google Search in your computer stops working, would you go to bank or get up and have a cup of coffee and try google again . Im guessing he would do the latter. I do google sometimes, i do some shopping as well as amazon pretty much all over the place. Excellent. So a, the network actually create that mode youre talking about but the deeper point is, i think the rules of freemarket capitalism stop working. Its like laws of gravity that okay, as long as both sides know what the transaction is and prices are going down, whats the problem . Well, in this world in which you are paying in dollars but in your data, neither of those things old. So you dont know what you are giving up or what youre getting. You know youre getting a search but you dont know how much the data is worth you just gave google or amazon for that search. Its a very asymmetric transaction. Thats a problem right away. Also, when youre doing barter and not paying in dollars, thats not freemarket. Thats not the way a