Article Summary

Link to article is here

Published on: February 20th, 2020

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In the article “Who will benefit most from the data economy”, the author explores the impacts of the growing data economy and emphasizes the need to shape the distribution of wealth from this new economy.

The author highlights that the current data economy is very unequal with Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook making a combined profit of $55bn. There is a similarly unequal power distribution among countries with America and China account for 90% of the market capitalization of the world’s largest platforms (see chart on the left).

In addition to the current unequal distribution of wealth of the data economy, the author describes the impacts of the data economy on the individuals generating the data: consumers. The author proposes the idea of “data co-operatives” which would remove the burden of data control from individuals by acting like trade unions to negotiate rates for data work and bill data firms that benefit from collecting people’s data.

Reflection

I had not realized how unequal the distribution of big data was and how this could eventually impact income inequality. In the article the author makes the point that “size begets size” as larger companies have access to more data and better data scientists to produce better algorithms thus enabling them to consolidate their place in the market. I think it will be interesting to see how regulations form around big data and if we will see antitrust legislation specifically for big tech companies.

Publication Information

The Economist is a weekly magazine which focuses on current affairs, international business, politics and technology. It is owned by the Economist Group, a london based organization worth $90 M in total assets.

Viewership Summary:

Print Digital Audience
909476 748459 3.5e+07

TLDR & Similar Articles

TLDR

What I found most useful in the article was the author’s discussion of the relatively few and large players in the big data field. Not only are their few platforms (Amazon, Apple, ect.) that reap a majority of the benefits of big data - there are few countries (US and China).

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