After mainly focusing on the midterms in the initial segment, Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver moved on to talk about the central topic of Season 9, Episode 14: The internet. Specifically, who owns the monopoly of the internet and why we should care.
The usual suspects who engage in anticompetitive conduct are Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. This should come as no surprise since it is more or less common knowledge that these companies are the most prominent in their field. However, as Oliver details in this episode, not everyone is aware of the way in which these tech giants completely suppress their competition, “choking them off” before they even have “a fair chance to try”.
Oliver and the team at Last Week Tonight could not pass up the chance to take aim once again at “Business Daddy” AT&T for having engaged in similar anti-competitive strategies in the past. However, unfortunately for AT&T, they were the target of an anti-trust lawsuit that eventually resulted in the company being “broken up by the government”.
Practices like those by AT&T, seriously impede innovation from happening. This is the same problem that we’re currently experiencing with the largest tech companies. These companies – Amazon, Apple, and Google – tend to engage in self-preferencing which results in an unfair advantage for them. For instance, if one owns an iPhone there is only one place where apps can be downloaded: The app store. A similar thing happens with Google’s play store. The problem with this is that, as the British-American comedian explains, these companies take incredible commissions from in-app sales, taking away a significant amount from developers and making billions every year.
It should also come as no surprise that Google holds the monopoly over internet searches, which amounts roughly to 90% of all searches made. Another problem with this is that Google makes their own content appear first in the search history compared to competitors, effectively stifling competition.
But according to Oliver, “the company most guilty of self-preferencing” is Amazon. Amazon is essentially the marketplace for online sales and consistently favors itself by displaying its items in the Buy Box compared to the other sellers, some of whom have cheaper prices for the same item. In short, as the late-night show host affirms: “It is Amazon’s playground, they make the rules, and they do seem to win a lot of the time.”
So, what can be done? There is good news. There are two bills, the Open App Markets Act and American Choice and Innovation Online Act, that are currently going before congress and if approved they could “address some of the problems” that are referenced in this episode. Naturally, the tech companies affected are pushing hard against these bills with poor excuses that do not hold water.
As Oliver defends in his conclusion to the episode, things on the internet, no matter what you might think, do not work well right now because it is a fact that people do not know what they are missing if they are never given other options. This limits the possibilities for startups that oftentimes do not even get a chance “to get started”. These two bills “would crack the door back open for innovation” so it is in every consumer and internet surfer’s best interests that they get passed.
