Stories and uncover them in opinion form which is a rather large mandate. [laughter] in order to narrow the funnel i started looking through corporate figures and i saw from an amazing number of in terms of how the transition from the Financial Sector to the Technology Sector since the great financial crisis and one of the numbers that stuck out was a Mckinsey Global institute figure looking at how 80 of corporate wealth was being held in just 10 of firms and those are the firms that were richest in personal data and intellectual property so basically if you are trafficking in these things you are holding the majority of the worlds corporate wealth and the biggest of those firms were the ones that i profile in the book, facebook, apple, amazon, netflix a little bit and google. They make money, all of them, pretty differently but there is some overlap with facebook and google and Digital Advertising but look at apple and they mostly shunned advertising and look to sell their devices and technology, uber you mentioned is not an ad driven Profitable Company but makes money on a whole different basis. Besides the fact we think of them as all being attacked they all have one thing in common. Great question but it is an interesting point because right now they are all trying to very much separate each other while regulators looked tightly at this space. I think that think they do all have in common is the Network Effect. The Network Effect is something i talk about a lot in my book and it is the idea that as you get big you get bigger. The Business Model of these companies and of many unicorns in Silicon Valley and the private billiondollar firms is to get territory as goofy as possible so everybody wants a moat, move fast and break things. You get in and you do this in many cases by sacrificing margin. A company like amazon but also like uber, for example, you go and undercut the worlds Taxi Services and to take over the entire industry and worry about profits later. This is something that businesses simply have not been able to do at scale in this way until now and that in and of itself has ramifications and it cuts competitors out that may be anticompetitive and point to monopoly power. It is called dont be evil which harks back to googles, now i guess in a corporate sent is called alphabet but googles original very optimistic and yet simplistic statement about itself and what it was going to adhere to and the indication is it is not evil but they have certainly gotten bad. Right. What is bad about being big and powerful and successful . Where to start. [laughter] i wrote 350 pages on it. Dont be evil was a mantra that the google guys came up with in the 1990s which is when the internet was a garage industry, consumer industry was just been born and had these individual smalltime entrepreneurs coming up with these companies and the reason i decided to focus on google and on this idea of not being able is that google was there in the beginning but when you write a book, particularly a completed book that looks at economic, political and social issues you want to find a narrative arc. At the time i looked at this facebook was the company that was in the news for election and epilation and there has been plenty of that on google but election manipulation, monopoly power, bad behavior in general but if you go back and look at google and its foundings i read a paper that larry page and the founders of google wrote and in 1998 and you can find the paper on the internet that it looks at what is a Search Engine and how would you run a Search Engine and how would you pay for the Search Engine and at the very end in an appendix section 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 and seen what you are clicking on and what are you searching and building a digital voodoo doll of you and showing that to advertisers and auctioning your eyeballs off for the highest bidder and that Business Model would eventually bring users and advertisers into conflict and their interests would not be the same grade vide companies or, for example, large state entities like russia or iran or rightwing nationalists or whoever might want to reach you and try to influence you. This was amazing to me. Like a grim prophecy. This is one thing the bunkmate when i see tech ceos get up on the hill and say we are so sorry that we could never have imagined all these terrible things pretty well, go back to that paper in 1998. It was all there in the small print the unspoken foil in the statement, dont be evil, was microsoft. At the time in the 90s especially in the mid to late 90s they were seen as this descendent evil empire that had stepped on apple with windows 3. 1 and stormed into the internet and trying to own everything. It is on now that bill gates is now this sainted figure and technology, giving this money away and why doesnt every billionaire do what he does and it is seen as this kindly gentler and effective ceo and they dont come under too much fire or scrutiny. No, its true. I didnt focus on microsoft and i think it is microsoft had their way im sure they would be happy to have a very successful Search Engine but that goes to the point in everything you say hones in on what constitutes monopoly power and what constitutes anticompetitive behavior because the mega soft antidepressant case which actually allowed a lot of people would say the space bar google to be born into grow that happened over 20 years ago at this time and this was the last time that regulators and the public really looked at Silicon Valley and took a hard look at the tech sector and said okay, we have competition problems here. Now, microsoft spent so much time i think grappling with those issues and being drawn into legal battles that google was able to get this leg up. Google was trafficking non software but in data, in surveillance capitalism as who wrote a wonderful book on that topic has dubbed it. That is a whole new world and if you go to some of the books written about data economics by people like who is the chief economist at google talk a lot about the power of networks and how in this new world the Network Effect of surveillance capitalism that these companies would become natural monopolies but that is the whole thing. These guys did not want to get into the business unless they thought they could create monopolies so that, in a way, sort of comes into conflict with the dont be evil slogan pretty early on. Yet, it is completed to because while we talk about them as being monopolies and having monopoly power in a lot of cases but at the same time they are all competing with each other is what they would argue. They say amazon is in the lead and microsoft is the challenger and in operating systems microsoft is leaving and apple is a challenger and in smart phones apple is in the lead and if youre touting devices but google is in lead if youre counting operating systems. They would argue look for much condition there is but when looking at the wrong there is so much wrong with that argument but you are reminding me an early conversation i had with google when i started thinking about this book i met with one of their strategy folks and put forward my idea that hey, you are a natural monopolist and we have a competition issue here and she looked surprised and said feel like we are competing against the big guys all the time but that is the issue and its goliath and goliath at this point. Have a handful of players basically three, four companies that have taken over everything and are actually moving into entirely new fields so just look in the last few months at the landgrab that is happening on the part of apple, amazon, google in areas like healthcare and areas like finance and we have seen amazon go overnight into the grocery business. It is hard to think of a business that couldnt be disrupted by the giant firms. That might make the question of why havent you seen other Major Industries saying we need a monopoly and we are bringing a suit and its a very Faustian Bargain because they benefit from every company in the world benefits from the power of targeted advertising and they are all using its an increasingly the model that has been pioneered by these businesses, harvesting our personal data for free, imagine if gm got its steel for free. They would have doubledigit Profit Margins two. Harvesting our data for free and selling it, collating it across devices and across industry and you look at the privacy and security and monopoly issues when a company like facebook and then think about layering your Checking Account onto it or healthcare data onto it and then think about the world of smart speakers and how the surveillance is all around us now and not just online but in our smart homes and smart car. Do you have an amazon echo . My husband loves it and keeps it in his office but i insist you turn the darn thing off i go in there. I cannot imagine. Im the same way. Yet, particularly at the political moment we live in i do not want surveillance in my ho home. Lets talk about exactly what [inaudible] is and the idea and fill in the detail here. The idea that by watching people and by collecting data on what people are doing you can build a whole Economic System that does not necessarily benefit them and they are not necessarily the consumer but they are the goods. It is funny, just the word consumer so shoshana goes back in everyone should read it and i read it for my research but she looks in a very academic way most through a marxist lens at the history of capitalism and how this new surveillance capitalism is, in some ways, the ultimate fruition of corrupting society or the citizen, turning a citizen into a consumer and out turning a consumer, a person into a raw material as we are followed around online these digital patterns are developed. We get none of that resource so my shopping pattern, the fact that i have an issue with buying shoes and the same kind of dresses over and over again, you know, thats my desire and my habit in my personal information and that is my behavior. It is no longer mine and it is being harvested by google and by amazon and used to sell me more things. Now, we have not even gotten an replay of time to go into the political but take what weve talked about in terms of purchasing and corporate monopoly power and start to put that into the political arena. One of the things that happens online is you get more of what you click on print if you are clicking on lets say you are on youtube and like my son youre clicking on lebron james videos all the time. You are getting a lot of those and you could give you any stats about the nba but if you are clicking on right wing hate speech you are also getting more of that. That is called a filter bubble. That benefits these committees because they monetize 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 and the real railroad titans, every ceo and founder and billionaire when they get to be a certain size and have to they by politicians and by lobbying power but we have a new system in this world of surveillance where that power comes not just from top down and we can get into how big tech is by dollar the largest lobbying group in washington but comes from the bottom up because our behavior can be manipulated, these algorithms know us in some ways better we know ourselves. George soros, the financier and political activists give a speech a couple of years ago which you may have heard talking about do we even have free will in this world anymore . Are we really in danger of losing john stuart mill, the ability to be free citizens in an open society in a world in which we can be controlled at this level by algorithms. It sounds like some the original questions about advertising. Yeah. Addiction to television. You probably read the intention and its free promo for other peoples books but we are all in the same game here. Tim wu who was at columbia, antitrust scholar, did a book looking at some of these similarities but i do think that this world of digital surveillance capitalism is fundamentally different. It is everywhere all the time and these services are like utilities. Can you imagine having ecommerce or your uber app pulled . Its a whole new world we are only at the beginning because we talk about smart speakers for example. Those sales are going up exponentially digits a year and that has more of a cognitive power. When you hear suggestion given to you by voice it is even more powerful in terms of influencing your behavior than if you just type in a search and go where google tells you to do. Weve already seen and we are seen as more antitrust actions roll out the power of the companies that can erase you as a product and as a person if they want to. It is too much power. Tim cook, apples ceo would probably say lana we are not the problem the part of the solution for we have this idea and concept differential privacy that we are building into our products where we are not setting peoples identifying data out of their device and using that to inform our ai but we are shielding that and taking general insight and keeping ourselves in our own hands clean so we are not trafficking in it. Is that true . Is that right . Or is there a hole in the argument . I think it is largely to put their 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 a google or facebook. It is not a data harvester in the same way that a google or facebook and those Companies Make 85, 90 of their revenue on Digital Advertising that apple makes selling hardware devices. It wants to create that network and create that ecosystem in the loop you into buying as many apple products and services as possible so in that way it uses the Network Effect but i would point out a couple of things. For starters, apples commitment to privacy has varied very much depending on what country you are talking about. Apple will capitulate on privacy in china in ways that it would not dream of doing in the u. S. So it is certainly subject to political pressure, differences in the way Different Countries regulate data and it is not going to stand up and fight beijing on these things. I would also say there are a couple of other problems with apple that overlap with some of the problems i see with google and facebook. One is in terms of who gets what part of the innovation pie. One of the big arguments right now when regulators in the public say these companies are too big and we have to make them or bring them to heal and make them smaller or break them up and they will say look, its a battle between regulation and innovation but we have to save stay big to innovate. I would argue these committees and apple is foremost amongst them are implement others, not innovators. Implement others. They are implement tours of fremont other peoples technologies. You can see this playing out and theres a great story right now in the headlines that google battle. Sonos, a beast to pick with apple. Its a maker with a small innovator, guy came up with this way to make smart speakers very intuitive company, came up with a lot of technology that were adapted by both google and apple and asked those Companies Got bigger and more powerful they started infringing on those patents and sonos has not taken apple to court over patent infringements and it couldnt afford to take on both google and apple over patent infringements but apple has had major fights with other Big Companies like qualcomm and apple, in some ways, is responsible much more so than huawei which the chinese chipmaker gets a lot of slack for okay, they are becoming the new go to chip company and they are infringing on qualcomm but apple was on a three continents battle with qualcomm, biggest 5g innovator in the world infringing on its patents but at some point got big and said we dont want to pay what you are asking. These companies are implementing thousands of technology and they want them to be an expensive and are, in some cases, legally taking opensource information and other cases infringing on patents but sometimes they simply buy out Small Companies in order to get rid of competition but again, it is the big getting bigger and using the system, i think, to [inaudible] its a zerosum game. To make one more point you cant have an economy in which four companies are taking all the wealth. You got to have a bigger Innovation Ecosystem. Sonos is suing google and they said they wouldve sued amazon to but cannot afford to take both of them on at the same time. Amazon, not apple. Im sorry. Amazon has been taken on vice modify. Could into argue that the limitation is innovation in a lot of cases . Steve jobs went to see it and said how can you have this just sitting here and they ought to bring this to the world and put out his version but that is one thing that is the allegation and sonos case but could one argue that part of what companies and maybe even Big Companies become good at is actually bringing that innovation into life and into the economy and getting it to people. May no, a lot of people would argue that but i guess i would say i dont see a consumer electronic product that really, lets face it, have Game Changing innovation since the smart phone which was in 2007. Every thing else has been more or less iterative and it is been about apple being extremely clever as a marketer and as a brand creator. Value at this point lives in three places, and lives globally, ip, data, big brands, they are able to greet a veneer and desirability and in real estate. That is where value lives. I think in the new world that we are moving into i think th