Too Much Power In Too Few Hands: Father Of Web Tim Berners-Lee Says Tech Giants Should Be Split-Up

In an interview with Reuters, Tim Berners Lee, the father of the internet who created the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, warned of consequences of too much clout in the hands of tech giants like Google, Facebook etc.

According to him, tech giants have become powerful monopolies and there would be a need to break them up, unless market upheavals like competition or change in user preferences reduce their popularity.

“What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so throughout the history there has been no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up,” Mr Lee mentioned in the interview. He added, “There is a danger of concentration.”

2018 has particularly damaging for Facebook. It got hacked, with details of 14 million user accounts leaked, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg had to appear before the US Senate Committee to testify in the Cambridge Analytics Controversy and there is a new litigation against it, claiming that it had lied to advertisers regarding video metrics.

Google also had to shut down Google+ after it was found to be compromised. The EU (European Union) fined Google for abusing its dominant position in the Android case.

While Apple and Amazon, have both reached the market cap of $1 trillion each this year, Microsoft and Google are in the vicinity. Facebook has a market cap of around half a billion dollars. In comparison, India’s economy stands at $2.6 trillion.