Three predictions for 2019
1. A splintering in Silicon Valley
After the mid-terms, brutally yet unsurprisingly lost by the Republicans, Team Trump will lash out at Big Tech with increased fervour in an effort to break it all up and fill the void inside.
Those efforts will fail. Mostly because they’re aimed at proving a false, liberal bias. As a result, there will be less groundswell across the political spectrum for what is essentially a very relevant effort.
But Trump, gnawing through Sessions and other AG’s while trying to pick a fight with Silicon Valley, will indeed pave the way for increased checks and balances on Big Tech monopolies after 2019. And when EU fines will start to be getting paid by Apple, Google and FB, expect other governments to wake up soon enough.
It will take well until Trump’s likely second term before Big Tech breaks up, but the writing’s on the wall: at least one of the GAFA mastodons will spin off subsidiaries. I expect Google to spin YouTube, and possibly AWS from Amazon.
It reminds me of the 1982 anti-trust suit being brought against AT&T at the Supreme Court. Or the one against Microsoft’s browser monopoly in 2001. (I learned about both in Tim Wu’s excellent book The Master Switch.) Expect a Cambrian explosion of cool tech, new content formats, new entrepreneurs, some nuisances and really great things you and me didn’t thought possible as more anti-kartel US kicks in Stateside.
Yes, with Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Simultaneously, the EU, India, China and some of the other more affluent Asian countries will try to hit two birds with one stone in regulating Big Tech next year: parry social unrest exacerbated by social media and monopolies, and stimulate their national tech scenes –one of the few fairly easily obtainable economic growth markets left in the age of automation — by imposing more rules and regulations on what data can and can’t be offered, collected and shipped out by American tech companies.
