Podcast listeners are increasing, but the interest in video podcasts is even more so. This is said by Spotify, the world’s leading audio streaming platform, which has pioneered listening content but is changing its skin. Its intention is to focus strongly on the video format, which allows it to broaden its audience of creators and viewers, thus gaining more visibility, more advertisers and, therefore, more revenue. It is a long-term plan but also a precise choice that will lead Spotify to find new solutions and confront new rivals, first and foremost, YouTube. I am not interested in comparing the two platforms, listing the strengths and weaknesses of each, but rather in investigating how the tech industry has become an oligopoly in almost all its markets.
Many challenges for the two
Let’s think for a moment: the Spotify-YouTube challenge adds to a series of duels going on for years, such as iOS-Android for mobile operating systems, Apple-Samsung among high-end smartphones, and Apple-Microsoft among PCs. Also testifying to the fact that the industry continues to shrink – because it is based on the control of a few large, rich and powerful companies – is the evolution of the last few years, with AI opening up a new world at the moment seemingly divided between OpenAI and Google, as well as an Apple-Meta duel in the area of augmented reality visors/glasses.
The list could go on, remaining confined to a limited number of companies. Which are no longer such in terms of size and ability to influence the lives of people and states. On the other hand, we have known for years how the revenues of GAFAM, the acronym that unites Google, Amazon, Facebook (later to become Meta), Apple and Microsoft, are more significant than the GDP of countries such as Sweden and Israel, not just countries with more backward or developing economies.
The commercial, technological, and IT oligopoly is now difficult to counter. It is impossible for other companies, even if the example of OpenAI shows that something can be done, at least in new areas and by developing innovative technologies. Today, it seems impossible that in the West, a company can emerge and impose itself that can threaten Amazon’s dominance in eCommerce or that of Meta in the development of social media.
This is a huge and too underestimated issue, precisely because we all take the technologies, services and products made by big tech for granted. Taking it for granted, however, also means being left in the dark when something doesn’t work. This occurs whenever Google, Amazon, or Meta have problems sending their respective services into a tailspin. Relying totally on a company’s managed services means putting that company above everything, including the rules.
Only after years of domination did Europe and the United States first realise the regulatory loopholes that allowed big companies to pursue their goals unhindered. Hundreds of investigations have been opened against GAFAM, accused in different ways and at different times of distorting the market and free competition, exploiting dominant positions, making mergers and acquiring smaller companies to stifle the risk of a possible alternative to the service/product they already have. We should not forget the tax chapter, workers’ rights, and respect for customers’ privacy.
Reversing the perspective
These are aspects that require a lot of attention, provided we start putting them on the table and discuss, together with the big techs themselves, how best to safeguard people’s rights. Because they are companies that rightly seek profit, but before companies there are people. Perhaps the time has come to reverse the situation, putting people’s interests ahead of the goals of the companies which pursue the good of their shareholders. Trying to put things back in the right order must be the first step to restoring order without giving up on the evolution of technology, which remains a significant lever for the development of contemporary society. This, at least, is the hope with which I approach 2025.
