One beneficiary of the scandal surrounding a massive data leak from Facebook has been its fellow technology giant Amazon. The resilience of Apple and Amazon relative to Facebook reflects a market judgment that their businesses are more anchored in the analogue world. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple – or Gafa as they have come to be known – represent something entirely new and all too familiar. They still have that function, but antitrust law was also originally conceived as a device to correct big structural imbalances in the economy. The nature of their businesses was not imagined when existing laws were written and their power is of an order that now rivals that of the governments that would regulate them.

Source: The Guardian March 21, 2018 17:15 UTC