I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.
But these aren't American companies any more. They were founded in America, and there are lots of jobs created by them in America, and there's something to be said for both those things. But I think there's a larger issue here which is that sovereignty is being eroded by the consolidation of wealth and power. Companies move to Ireland to avoid taxes, set up warehousing shell companies in Nevada to avoid taxes, set up legal holding companies in Delaware so they can do whatever they want, file patents in Jamaica to claim precedence on things that others may have thought of, and I'm sure tons of other things that I'm not aware of.
> "The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret."
Jamaica and some other countries don't maintain searchable databases, allowing companies to register trademarks abroad in secret and then point to those registrations when claiming the mark in the US.
The actual point still stands though (though it is in response to something that doesn't even stand on it's own, but hey). Replace "patents" with "trademarks", which is not necessary for the structural integrity of the argument either way -- and follow the HN guidelines about the strongest interpretation of a comment.
But for much of the western world it's these American household names which have direct influence on people's livelihoods more than any other on a social/cultural level. When companies like Apple, Facebook and Google reach the 'giant' status that they have, the average person will have a choice made for them, becuase of what the status quo is, despite there being alternatives out there. The larger they get, the less choice the world has, meaning less indpendence.
Perhaps it only seems that way for household names like apple, Facebook and google.
There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world. E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea)
My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarantee that she and probably most other people's mother's have never ever heard of ARM.
What's another example? This one strikes me as unique because ARM just sells their IP.
Sure, our mothers probably haven't heard of ARM but that's more like saying they haven't heard of x86. Our mothers have almost definitely heard of Samsung and Apple, both of whom manufacture a large number of ARM chips.
There's even a decent chance they've heard of a company like Qualcomm that's not as well known as Apple or Samsung.
Different parts of the industry have very different potential for political power.
If you wanted to influence a US presidential election, a 100% monopoly on the printing press would be much more useful than a 100% monopoly on zipper manufacturing.
The former is presumably what newspaper opinion writers are worried about.
