Does Amazon have 40% market share, or 10%? Does Apple have 15%, or 80%? Does Google worry about Bing, or Tiktok? It depends, and it's complicated, but this determines a large part of all the tech anti-trust cases coming up in the next few years.
Read MoreWhat’s going to happen in ecommerce and retail? TV? TV ads? Retail? Brands? Online advertising? There are half a dozen huge industries where all of the cards are being thrown up in the air, and no-one really knows where they’re going to land.
Read MoreFor its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and attitudes are fragmenting.
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The app store model has been a central part of the smartphone revolution, bringing safe, trusted software to billions of people for the first time. Breaking it would be insane. The trouble is, it also means Apple (and Google) aren’t the pirates anymore - they’re the navy, the port and the customs house, so how do they manage that, and how soon do regulators step in?
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Most of the things we worry about aren't actually competition problems, but even where they are, breakups are unlikely to be effective. The real answers are in much more detailed and micro work: in regulating the internal mechanics of these products, line by line, much as we regulate telcos or credit cards.
Read MoreWe regulate lots of industries, from food to cars to airlines, and now we’re going to regulate tech. But what does that mean? Regulating tech won’t be any more easy or simple than any other kind of policy - policy is complicated and full of trade-offs.
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Microsoft and IBM used to dominate tech - today they’re still big companies, but no-one is scared of them anymore. That wasn’t because of anti-trust. Rather, the products that used to give them dominance stopped mattering. We still use Windows, and mainframes, but they’re not the centre of tech anymore.
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Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
Read MoreWe worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they break, and we worry what happens if they work too well.
Read MoreMachine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
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