There was a time that oil companies ruled the globe, but "black gold" is no longer the world's most valuable resource — it's been surpassed by data.
The five most valuable companies in the world today — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google's parent company Alphabet — have commodified data and taken over their respective sectors.
"Data is clearly the new oil," says Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.
But with that domination comes responsibility — and jurisdictions are struggling with how to contain, regulate and protect all those ones and zeros.
For instance, Google holds an 81 per cent share of search, according to data metrics site Net Market Share.
By comparison, even at its height, Standard Oil only had a 79 per cent share of the American market before antitrust regulators stepped in, Taplin says.
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Traditionally, this is where the antitrust regulators would step in, but in the data economy it's not so easy. What we're seeing for the first time is a clash between the concept of the nation state and these global, borderless corporations. A handful of tech giants now surpass the size and power of many governments.
For comparison sake, Facebook has almost two billion users, while Canada has a population of just over 36 million. Based on the companies' sheer scale alone, it is increasingly difficult for countries to enforce any kind of regulation, especially as the tech giants start pushing for rules that free them from local restrictions, says Open Media's Meghan Sali.Machine learning and automation technologies could render as much as 40% of the population in the developed world not merely unemployed, but unemployable. Huge technology companies now control more access to information, and more money, than most governments. There's a growing realization that everyone around you has an internet-enabled video camera in their pocket, and could be surveilling you with neither your knowledge nor your consent, all the time, and uploading the data to those same huge mega-corporations. It's not quite Neuromancer, but we're definitely living a world that very different than the world of even twenty years ago; a world that's still changing, since all of these technological trends are still in their early days.
And that doesn't even factor in the Earth's changing climate...
Welcome to the world of tomorrow, today; the Singularity, already underway.
There's a lot more to that CBC piece, by the way; it's definitely worth reading.