Tech giants are a fascinating illustration of the main fields I teach: microeconomics and global business environment. I received a prize for one of my cases studies on the topic of Amazon. I also discussed these topics with various media outlets (most notably here, here, here, here and here). You can also check out my latest piece in Forbes on repairing a broken tech industry.
The GAFA (for Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) looks to me like a 21st century oligopoly.
Like past oligopolies, the GAFA is economically influential and its ability to shape economic activity and trade goes beyond the mere boundaries of its own industry. Members of this oligopoly can compete against each other in the short run, on specific activities and in order to gain more consumers at the expense of the others. But they can also cooperate, at least implicitly, by taking, for instance similar stances on key government policies, such as data privacy and the constitutional rights that protect it, or immigration and its economic effects. And ultimately, in the longer run, they look to differentiate from one another by looking for the most long-lasting business model that will lock in consumers for an extended period of time. As I argued elsewhere, “Salvation can only come from a permanent product revolution – a revolution these actors have imposed on the rest of the market, but that may set the bar for them ever higher.”
But it is not just an oligopoly. It is also a political force reshaping the world we live in. In fact, the ability of GAFA members to influence political dynamics could turn out to be far more significant than skeptics imagine. In particular, the GAFA members’ capability to redefine notions that are traditionally key in geopolitical thought, such as distance and proximity, both in the literal, geographical sense and in the digital sense of the terms, is striking. This has been particularly true for Amazon whose attempts to reduce distances in an effort to increase speeds of delivery and thus the size of its markets has led the company to constantly redefine its breadth and reach. But it is also true in the case of Facebook which has redefined the meaning of relationship, communities and thus proximity by making the digital component of these more concrete for individuals. The same way, Apple prides itself with their effort to rethinking the notion of interconnectedness within a tribe, be it defined at the family or at the more global level. Finally, the role of the GAFA in providing the rest of the planet with information, in a time in which individuals and states are particularly concerned with reliability and authenticity of the news they get, allows each of the members to put forward its own definition of reliability and authenticity. Whereas this often starts with a discussion over algorithms, as it is the case with Facebook and Google, the conversation quickly becomes political and value-based and is, as result, inseparable from political perceptions and realities.
This is at the heart of my research on tech giants. Below are just a few pieces. More substantial work to come.
Selected Publications on Tech Giants
“Tech Giants Rise and Fall: How Social Entrepreneurs Will Reshape the Tech World,” HEC Paris Master Class, London, June 2018
Strategy in a Chaotic World: The Geopolitics of Amazon, 2017. Available here.
“When Tech Giants Take Control,” Talk for the LSE Department of Management, London, February 2017. Available here.
“Quand les géants du Net veulent prendre le contrôle…,” Présentation au club The Bridge, Queen Mary 2, June 2017
“La Géopolitique et les GAFAs,” Débat HEC Paris à Roland Garros, Paris, June 2016. Available here.
Individual empowerment: Global Societal Trends to 2030, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015 (co-authored with Marlon Graf, Dmitry Khodyakov and Ohid Yaqub). Available here.
The 2015 Case Centre award winner in the Economics, Politics and Business Environment category: The Economics of Amazon, 2014. Available here and featured here.