Today’s tech titans are often compared to the robber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. How do they stack up?
Not well. Both groups consisted of innovators who did everything in their power to crush the competition. The robber barons, however, succeeded in bringing new products and services to the masses that improved their lives, and were thus inescapable; in the case of Facebook, on the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg just created a platform that uses information generated by third parties to sell advertisements. The social utility of that service does not remotely compare to a railroad or a steel or petroleum product.
Of course, if you have a monopoly on a product or service some portion of the public absolutely has to have, as in the case of farmers and the railroads in the late nineteenth century, you can pretty well charge whatever you want for it regardless of the damage you inflict on your consumers in the absence of effective regulations. In that respect, today’s robber barons present less of a problem than their predecessors. I can easily choose not to buy Apple products or to be on Facebook, and I do.
In the long run, I think Zuckerberg will be remembered more for his (profoundly negative) impact on political systems than the economy. The tech titan who reminds me most of the earlier gang is Bezos. For better or worse–and there is plenty of both-he is making massive, irrevocable changes to our real economy, not just a virtual one.