The internet is increasingly controlled by a select few tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon even though it was designed to be a massive, decentralized system that nobody controlled.

And these companies are continuing to consolidate power, feels the CEO of a cybersecurity company.

“More and more of the internet is sitting behind fewer and fewer players, and there are benefits of that, but there are also real risks,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of web security company CloudFlare, in an interview with CNBC. He was speaking at a conference featuring tech executives and government security experts in San Francisco called CloudFlare’s Internet Summit.

Facebbok, the largest social media platform with 1.7 billion monthly active users who visit the site to consume news alongside family photos and ads, has faced a lot of criticism for perceived abuse of its editorial sway among its active users. Recently Facebook removed a post featuring an iconic image known as the Napalm Girl that included a naked girl running from napalm bombs which drew the ire and criticism of a Norwegian newspaper editor who slammed Mark Zuekrberg for Facebook’s removal the post.

“If everything sits behind Facebook and you can’t publish pictures like that, is the world a better place? Probably not,” said Prince.

“Before you know it, you could wake up and find more of the internet sits behind a small number of gate-keepers,” said Prince. Putting that sort of power in the hands of a small number of people and companies “might not be the best thing,” he said.

He still however feels that the major internet companies are likely to continue with the wave of consolidation of the internet.

The big internet platform are enabled to do things more inexpensively because they do them for a lot of people as these companies have amassed much power to the extent that that they benefit from huge economies of scale. More users are drawn to their platform as the data that they have makes their services more effective and hence they also benefit from network effects.

But these companies are doing some good things like Facebook and Alphabet’s Google are both working on extending the internet to remote corners of the globe and which is expensive to achieve. Only a few companies are able to extend their reach to parts of the world as they come online after they expend much resource to invest in the technology for the extension. Prince said that it makes more sense, in many cases, for developers to build products on top of these existing platforms.

He said that entrepreneurs are realizing that the most effective way to build a product and a business is to do so behind those platforms and the advantages of being a company like Google are massive.

“You have just got a huge amount of the internet being concentrated by a very small number of players, and I think that’s going to be the interesting story of the years ahead, because that isn’t what the internet has been traditionally,” said Prince

(Adapted from CNBC)

Categories: Uncategorized