Tim Berners-Lee proposes breaking up tech giants

Companies like Facebook and Amazon are too dominant and hold too much power, says the father of the World Wide Web

Tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook may need to be broken up or risk new monopolies and duopolies forming, unless challengers or changing tastes reduce their influence, Tim Berners-Lee has told Reuters.

"What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field, so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up," said the inventor of the World Wide Web. "There is a danger of concentration."

The combined market value of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon is $3.7 trillion: equal to Germany's 2017 GDP; and arguably, they wield just as much influence. However, the speed of technology innovation could take care of the problem without intervention:

"Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else."

Berners-Lee also said that he is "disappointed" with the current state of the internet, including personal data abuse and the use of social media to spread hate.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, during which it came out that the company had obtained information on 87 million Facebook users, was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for many internet users.

"I am disappointed with the current state of the Web. We have lost the feeling of individual empowerment, and to a certain extent also I think the optimism has cracked."

Berners-Lee proposed ‘Mesh' in 1989, re-christening it the World Wide Web - which used a graphical interface (the web browser) to read pages and hyperlinks (URLs) to move between them - in 1990.