Giants behaving badly: Google, Facebook and Amazon show us the downside of monopolies and black-box algorithms
The internet is a wondrous thing — a limitless universe of content and products and information, all of which can be summoned up from the comfort of a chair or the palm of the hand …
Context & Ripple Effects
Three years after AllThingsD charted the rise of Google, the ascent of Facebook and the decline of everyone else, Gigaom's argument is that the consolidation phase has curdled into something uglier: the same scale that built these companies is now producing conduct that only gatekeepers can get away with.
The week supplies the case studies. Amazon is squeezing publisher Hachette by blocking pre-orders and marking titles unavailable, while Google sits on both sides of the labor market — settling the Silicon Valley no-poach lawsuit with three other firms even as it tops Glassdoor's pay-and-benefits rankings and keeps buying infrastructure, having taken drone maker Titan Aerospace in April with satellite startup Skybox Imaging rumored next.
First-order effects
- Amazon's blockade makes Hachette authors and readers the immediate casualties — booksellers' leverage over discoverability becomes a live grievance rather than an abstraction.
- Google's no-poach settlement puts its hiring practices under legal record while its Glassdoor-topping compensation shows how the same dominance funds both the violation and the perk.
Second-order effects
- Publishers facing Amazon-style squeeze have an incentive to fund alternative retail channels and to lobby for scrutiny of terms they cannot negotiate individually.
- Every confirmed acquisition like Titan Aerospace — plus rumored ones like Skybox — tightens Google's grip on aerial and orbital imagery inputs that startups and rivals would otherwise bid for openly.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward antitrust frameworks rebuilt for platforms whose power runs through ranking algorithms and default placement rather than classic price-fixing — opacity itself becoming the regulatory target.
- If gatekeeping conduct keeps paying, expect the industry structure to consolidate further around a few distribution chokepoints, with suppliers (publishers, content owners) absorbing terms they cannot refuse.
The trend: Internet platforms are crossing from competition into gatekeeper leverage, turning algorithmic opacity and distribution control into the central antitrust question of the decade.