Anti-trust - 21st century style

Anti-trust – 21^st century style

All of us know when a particular company or cabal of companies begin to and then control a sector of products, it invokes attention. These companies are sometimes subject to the anti-trust provisions of the law, i.e. Sherman Anti-Trust. That was yesterday, when companies created an unfair market advantage to increase profits. Many companies were broken up in this way, notably Standard Oil.

Today is different, with monopolies and cabals created to hold information, the commodity of the future. Implied here is that large corporations such as Amazon and Facebook contain so much information about citizens, it can actually affect what people do and how they buy. By marketing information, they will soon be moving into altering what citizens think, and even how they vote. The tip of this is already evident, with many pundits and news anchors discussing that such firms are becoming too big and controlling too much leverage in America. Alas, even they don’t know what to do. Shipping multiple millions of units pales next to mining and controlling multiple million-exabytes of data.

Information is the commodity of the future.

Just take a quick look at how many “information” companies are surging financially and continue to do so. They have tools, such as deep learning, that few understand. It seems obvious that some politician will adopt these ideas and develop legislation to rein in such firms, restricting how information can be used and sold. This is a tall order, with most all of them having little understanding of how powerful massive information data lakes can be.

I say, hurry, hurry, hurry somebody before the process is so deeply embedded, it will be nearly impossible to extricate from this trend.

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