More shame than a name: Will the real Mark Zuckerberg please stand up? October 29, 2021 What’s in a name? asks a star-crossed lover. The answer, she discovers, is everything. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is the realisation that neither can escape the fate dictated by their two names: Montague and Capulet. In Silicon Valley, one firm has alighted on a similar problem. Facebook’s leadership has realised, at last, that [...]
Tech industry jargon is full of hot air and keeps public valuations sky-high October 15, 2021 It was the presentation that cost £1.85bn. On Tuesday morning, Matt Moulding, the CEO and founder of The Hut Group, addressed his shareholders, attempting to reverse a precipitous slide in the company’s share price. It didn’t go well. Just hours after his presentation ended, the firm had lost another third of its value. The Hut [...]
Instagram Kids exposes the fallacy of Big Tech’s self-regulation October 1, 2021 “Who watches the watchmen?” asked the Roman poet Juvenal. To Big Tech watchers, the question is simpler: have the watchmen been watching at all? Technology is remarkably under-regulated. For years, regulators blithely waved through a series of mega-mergers, failing to act for lack of proof that free products can harm consumers. Meanwhile, a single piece [...]
The tale of Big Tech’s reckoning was spelled out by Rockefeller’s downfall September 23, 2021 The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described an effective free market as a “gale of creative destruction”. Old companies and outdated ideas would be cast aside by the market’s pursuit of the new, and the consumer would be the winner. It is little surprise then that incumbents tend to do all they can to arrest the [...]
A carbon tax will allow capitalism to save the climate September 3, 2021 The Extinction Rebels are back at their barricades. This week, they smashed windows at JP Morgan’s offices and blockaded London Bridge. Speaking to LBC in the aftermath, Sadiq Khan worried they are alienating the public from their cause. They are certainly an uncompromising lot. Arla, the milk-maker, was a target of their ire. Even the [...]
The recovery requires more capitalism, not less August 6, 2021 Last week, the US tech giants reported profits the size of a small country’s GDP. At around the same time, news broke that Conservative donors were paying to bend the ears and influence the policies of our Prime Minister and Chancellor. It wasn’t hard to conclude that something is rotten in the state of capitalism [...]
Facebook and Amazon are losing the antitrust argument but are gambling on America’s broken politics to save them July 19, 2021 In recent weeks, Amazon and then Facebook launched legal challenges against Lina Khan, the new Chair of America’s antitrust regulator, the Federal Trade Commission. Both argued that Khan should step aside in any future investigation into competitive practices and any possible pursuit of a Big Tech breakup. Rather than offering much criticism of the content of [...]
Facebook’s antitrust victory could be the inspiration Joe Biden needs to serve Big Tech a fatal blow July 2, 2021 When Charles Dickens’s Mr Bumble is confronted with the assumption that his overbearing wife “acts under his direction,” he responds with an argument for the ages: “If the law supposes that… the law is an ass.” Though Bumble’s argument might hold little water in a court of law, it isn’t an altogether bad one. It [...]
Bitcoin buoyancy is driven by popular mass delusion but the madness will keep making money May 28, 2021 In 1841, the journalist Charles Mackay published Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, his masterpiece. In it, he chronicled the economic bubbles and mass delusions that have plagued mankind across the ages. “Men… go mad in herds,” he warned, “while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” The cryptocurrency Bitcoin [...]
We shouldn’t be scared of the plague of activist investors April 30, 2021 Activist investors are the scourge of the corporate boardroom. Surreptitiously building sizeable stakes in public companies, they appear, uninvited and unannounced, bearing frightening demands. Often seeking the chief executive’s head on a platter, they are feared because they sometimes get it. In 2020, however, the activists went quiet. As businesses struggled to respond to the [...]
