[...] the profitability of the digital giants is centered on establishing proprietary systems for which they control access and the terms of the relationship [...]

A key development that accompanies and enables proprietary systems is cloud computing, wherein each of the giants stores vast amounts of material on their battalions of servers. users do not need to have massive computer memories to store their own material; they can—indeed, must—access everything they have from a small device just by gaining access to the cloud. There are still “little guys” who offer hosting services, and that is a constructive activity. At the other end of the spectrum, though, the digital monopolists, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have all invested to build enormous private clouds. Cloud computing is a brilliant way to make the Internet more efficient and less expensive to users and society, but whether having the preponderance of cloud capacity in the hands of a few giant firms is a wise policy is another matter altogether. The clouds can be a treasure chest full of valuable data for the giants to exploit.

In combination, these factors demonstrate how absurd are the claims by
giants like Microsoft and Google that “competition is a click away” and that
they are in mortal fear for their very survival if someone were to develop a
better algorithm in her garage. Amazon, too, is more than an algorithm
and a stack of patents. It has sixty-nine data and fulfillment centers in the
united States, seventeen of which were built since 2011, with plans for more
to come. It has a nonunion workforce [...]