From British technology site The Register:
'Break up Google and Facebook if you ever want innovation again'
If the tech industry wants another wave of innovation to match the PC or the internet, Google and Facebook must be broken up, journalist and film producer Jonathan Taplin told an audience at University College London's Faculty of Law this week.
He was speaking at an event titled Crisis in Copyright Policy: How the digital monopolies have cornered culture and what it means for all of us, where he credited the clampers put on Bell then IBM for helping to create the PC industry and the internet.
The Director Emeritus of the Annenburg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California also wrote the book Move Fast and Break Things, a surprise bestseller. Plenty of "the internet is awful" books have come and gone over the past decade but Taplin's experience captured the post-Trump mood, which has turned strongly against Silicon Valley's giant internet platforms this year. Taplin's experience is the difference: it's vast and varied. Over the years he's been Bob Dylan's manager, produced the movies Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and in 1997 launched the first ever VoD startup Intertainer, from which he knows a bit about antitrust.
A lot more at the site - makes perfect sense. 20 years ago, there was this fertile sea of innovation. Now it has dried up and only three entities have emerged - Google, Facebook and Microsoft; each of which are acting in their own self-interest.
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