Agreed. The article doesn't seem to have a strong case to make, and so has to cut corners on its evidence to make it seem right. A beautiful example is
> The silicon sultans are some of the few businesspeople who can compete with the robber barons in terms of ownership. Today most firms are widely held by large numbers of shareholders: the largest individual shareholder in Exxon, is Rex Tillerson, the company’s chief executive. He owns 0.05% of the stock. Together Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt control two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Mark Zuckerberg owns 20% of Facebook shares but almost all of its “class B” shares, which have ten times the voting power of ordinary shares.
So it makes a point about ownership, then compares Exxon's CEO's low _ownership_ with Facebook and Google founders' high _voting rights_. Not the same thing. For comparison, Schmidt has 2% of Google at the moment. And let's not forget Standard Oil started in 1870. How much stock shall we expect Google's CEO in 120 years to have?
> Today Google and Apple between them provide 90% of smartphone operating systems
These are two large companies competing heavily, investing billions of dollars for something that they give away free (Google esp, though apple makes its money on hardware so I would claim it doesnt charge for the OS).
To say that this is an "unparalleled concentration of power" is ridiculous. Specifically, it is a lesser concentration of power than Standard Oil, which was the comparison the article was trying to draw. If you take a group of competitors and put them in a single group and declare them to be the same, then of course you're going to mistake it for a monopoly. But that doesn't make it one.
> The silicon sultans are some of the few businesspeople who can compete with the robber barons in terms of ownership. Today most firms are widely held by large numbers of shareholders: the largest individual shareholder in Exxon, is Rex Tillerson, the company’s chief executive. He owns 0.05% of the stock. Together Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt control two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Mark Zuckerberg owns 20% of Facebook shares but almost all of its “class B” shares, which have ten times the voting power of ordinary shares.
So it makes a point about ownership, then compares Exxon's CEO's low _ownership_ with Facebook and Google founders' high _voting rights_. Not the same thing. For comparison, Schmidt has 2% of Google at the moment. And let's not forget Standard Oil started in 1870. How much stock shall we expect Google's CEO in 120 years to have?
> Today Google and Apple between them provide 90% of smartphone operating systems
These are two large companies competing heavily, investing billions of dollars for something that they give away free (Google esp, though apple makes its money on hardware so I would claim it doesnt charge for the OS).
To say that this is an "unparalleled concentration of power" is ridiculous. Specifically, it is a lesser concentration of power than Standard Oil, which was the comparison the article was trying to draw. If you take a group of competitors and put them in a single group and declare them to be the same, then of course you're going to mistake it for a monopoly. But that doesn't make it one.
I really expected better from the economist.