Let's not pretend they're not playing at an unfair advantage and abusing their powers to grow and monopolize the internet. Data collection and selling, purchasing start ups and killing them, "venture funding" and stealing ideas, tracking you across the internet, widening the wealth disparity, abusing public services, using size to squeeze governments, avoid paying taxes etc.
However on the flip side, they provide large technological advances that generally can't be done at this scale without government funding (quantum computers, self driving cars, the cloud, computational photography, etc) at such a cheap price. Also, other countries have their own tech giants and to stay competitive with them we need our own giants.
You can't discount their benefits but they're almost a necessary evil. There's also a fine line that they tend to step over and over and get their hands caught in the cookie jar one too many times, but they calculate the risk and know a government fine is going to be far less than the revenue they from abusing power and monopolizing new markets.
Thoughts?
Leave your own personal feelings / benefits / financial gains at the door. This is a purely subjective and hypothetical discussion.
They have too much power and too much influence over the people in the government to be broken up.
Dismantling a hierarchy would be damn hard, if not impossible. Cut off the head of a snake and another will grow in it's place. If not for these tech giants, it'll be others. We can't do shit about data collection, we can probably delay it. But yeah, all the money these tech companies get is being put forward into research and it's going to benefit our civilization in the long run.
2082 is going to have Apple interstellar colony ships.
Yes and no
Yes> Fuck monopolies
No> Fuck china
Don't think they should be broken up, just regulate them.
never forget your isp's sold you out for barely a few million in 2017