Today I received notification that a physical store I used to frequent when I was young is closing permanently. Having held on until 2019 is quite the feat considering physical stores with knowledge and service has been a NO GO! since the internet revolution in the 2000´s. Today's physical stores are reduced to Clothes, Jewelry, accessories, food and human to human services - basically the things where the need to touch, see and feel cannot quite be replaced by a web shop or AI (yet).

This notification really made me think of the world and where we are heading. See, I spent my post teenage life in the Internet age - a time where information freedom and vendor choices exploded with the proliferation of the Internet. Suddenly the barriers for information and product availability was almost removed - specialty websites, web stores, blogs and forums blossomed everywhere. The price of goods fell dramatically with production being moved to china and sales being done on the Internet. All of it in fierce competition with the new website next door. This killed the traditional stores unless they where heavily specialized and made the transition to the web - an almost impossible maneuver.

"Todays physical stores are reduced to Clothes, Jewellery, acessories, food and human to human services"

But this growth spur of information freedom and product vendor choice is now fading fast - just like the physical stores did. We have moved into the “Monopoly age” where the 5 big tech companies Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft is starting to decide what's right and wrong, and what you should use. I’ll leave china out of this article as they have another overlord - one that controls their tech giants - to deal with ;-)

Today those 5 companies are involved in basically everything about what we do and what we consume (media, products, knowledge and so on). They are slowly but steadily using that knowledge and involvement, to remove the remainders of what was once the free internet. No business, product or solution can live today without being heavily tied into some of the big 5’s platforms in some way.
Regardless of what great idea, knowledge or product you have, you have to share it with some of the big 5 in hopes of making it. They will make money on every step of your idea or products life cycle - including your failure. Whether it’s on the ad’s you need, the knowledge you generate, the infrastructure you need to use, the payments you need to accept, the sales channels you employ, the products you sell, the information you gather - and the list goes on and on. They have their tentacles into everything!

Every great idea that comes along today is also a great idea for the big 5. It will inevitably help increase their monopoly and reduce the competition - including the free in "The free internet".

We are now seeing large well known specialty websites, web stores, blogs and forums closing down - just like the physical stores of the 2000’s - because the big 5’s services are either copying them, already running/owning them or making them invisible to their funding sources. To run a specialty site/blog/forum you need funding, but advertisers and sponsors are not interested - they can target customers better and more easily with Facebook, Google or Amazon because of all the information they have on everybody.

"We have moved into the “Monopoly age” where the 5 big tech companies Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft is starting to decide what's right and wrong, and what you should use"

We are hurtling towards a decisive moment in time where we need to deal with the big 5’s monopoly. The interesting part will be: Can we?

Considering how much pressure the western democracies are under and how close to bankruptcy the world in general is, it will be very hard for our politicians - who's career also live or die by the hands of the big 5 - to take a stand. Are we seeing the dawn of a new world order where people and nation states are the pawns in the tech conglomerates chess game against each other?

Is it time to hail our new overlords?