We live in a world that feels like it’s overflowing with digital choice. You scroll through an app store with millions of options. You browse a web that seems like an infinite, chaotic bazaar of competing ideas and services. It feels like a vibrant, decentralized democracy of technology. But this feeling is largely an illusion. While we are busy choosing between a thousand different paint colors for our digital house, we fail to notice that a tiny handful of companies own all the land, control the water supply, and operate the only roads into town. These hidden monopolies control the very foundation of our digital lives, and their power is far greater than we realize.
The Landlords of the Cloud
You might love watching Netflix and hate Amazon Prime Video, but here’s a secret: for a long time, Netflix, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors in streaming, ran its entire service on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is the new reality. Almost every app, website, or online service you use—from your banking app to your food delivery service to government websites—is running on a server farm owned by one of three companies: Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. They have become the invisible landlords of the internet. This gives them immense power and creates a terrifying single point of failure. When AWS has a major outage, it doesn’t just take down one website; it takes down a huge chunk of the internet.
The Gatekeepers of Your Phone
There are millions of apps worldwide, but there are only two real ways to get them onto your phone: Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. This duopoly gives them absolute control. They are not just store owners; they are gatekeepers, bouncers, and tax collectors all rolled into one. They decide which apps are allowed to exist and which are not. They force developers to use their payment systems and then take a hefty cut—often as much as 30%—of every dollar you spend. A small developer who creates a brilliant new app doesn’t just have to compete in the market; they first have to get permission from one of two giant corporations that could also be their direct competitor.
The All-Seeing Ad Networks
You might think you’ve escaped Google’s reach by using a different search engine or avoiding Meta by deleting your Facebook account. But you haven’t. Google and Meta operate the two largest advertising networks on the planet. Their tracking pixels and ad services are embedded in millions of independent websites, news outlets, and apps across the web. They are the middlemen for a huge portion of the internet’s economy. They don’t just know what you do on their own properties; they follow you almost everywhere you go online, building an incredibly detailed profile of your life that they sell to advertisers. This makes it nearly impossible for any new, privacy-focused ad network to compete.
Why This Matters: The Danger of Centralization
This hidden concentration of power is dangerous. It stifles innovation because startups are forced to live by the rules of the giants they depend on. It creates a fragile system where a single corporate decision or technical failure can have cascading consequences for all of us. And it gives these companies an unnerving level of control over public discourse. The power to remove an app from an app store or to cut a service off from the cloud is the power to effectively erase a business or a voice from the digital world. This isn’t a free and open market; it’s a series of walled gardens where the owners can change the rules at any time.
Conclusion
The choices we see on our screens—the apps, the websites, the services—are just the surface level of our digital world. Beneath that surface, the real power lies with the companies that own the infrastructure. We are tenants in their world, not citizens in a digital republic. Until we start looking past the colorful icons and questioning who owns the fundamental plumbing of the internet, we will continue to cede more and more control of our lives to a handful of hidden monopolies that have become too powerful to ignore.
