In RetroTech: NetLingo Blog

From Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Lindsey Graham, many of our elected officials continue to brag about not using email. That's concerning. Even more startling is the fact that Congress doesn't get Big Tech. The Facebook hearing last year made it clear that very few U.S. Senators understand Facebook's business. Most of the questions came from tech-challenged Senators who seemed clueless about how Facebook makes its money and even how the Internet works.

"If a version of Facebook will always be free, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?" Senator Orrin Hatch, the 84-year-old Republican from Utah (who also famously doesn't use email), asked early on in the five-hour hearing. Mark Zuckerberg paused a moment before saying, "Senator, we run ads." He, and his staff sitting behind him, then grinned directly at him. There's a NetLingo word for that Senator Hatch: noob.

Watch this and tell me Congress, do you really want to be laughed at by Big Tech?



Meanwhile Trump is begging Big Tech for free labor to avoid federal hirings, and because of the government shutdown, 45% of employees in the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been furloughed, in addition to 85% of workers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

This all bothers me so I try to reach out and voice my concern but apparently you need to call, and not email, your legislators. I'm told even if you don’t speak directly to the lawmaker, staff members will often pass the message along in one form or another. Really? With a can and a line of string?

Congress, you cannot afford to be stuck in 1995. As Catherine Rampell from the Washington Post reminds us, the digital revolution is now decades old, affecting virtually every industry and public policy. Senators help make federal laws regulating technology, privacy, cybersecurity, and the digital economy, and for you, ignoring how everyone else in the nation communicates is a form of political malpractice. If you know little or nothing about technology in a technological age, you shouldn't be in the Senate, but if you are, then please hire a consultant like me.

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How dominant are Google, Facebook, and Amazon you ask? According to a briefing in my favorite magazine The Week, they are as dominant as Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, and American Tobacco were at the end of the 19th century.

• Google dominates search, video, and online ads and has an 885 market share in search advertising in the U.S.
• Facebook and its major subsidiaries—Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger—account for 77% of mobile social media traffic.
• Almost $1 of every $2 in online retail sales goes through Amazon.

Flush with revenues of tens of billions of dollars, each company has heavily expanded into other industries:

• Google dominates video (through YouTube), mapping, and personal email;
• Facebook is building consumer drones and virtual reality sets;
• Amazon recently bought the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 billion.

Digital enthusiasts once predicted that the internet would democratize business and industry; instead, it’s enabled a handful of firms to have such dominant market shares that it’s almost impossible to compete with them. T.J. Stiles, a biographer of the 19th-century business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, says we are living in a second Gilded Age. “Our lives,” he says, “are channeled once again through fewer and fewer companies controlled by a few men.”

So, what’s wrong with monopolies you may ask? When companies control a market, they tend to use their power to eliminate competition—often to the detriment of consumers. They can force suppliers to lower their prices, cutting their profits, and can bankrupt their rivals by undercutting them—or simply buy them out. Massive companies can also use economies of scale to eliminate jobs—particularly in the digital era, when much work can be automated. All this can result in reduced consumer choice, depressed wages, and a concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people in fewer locations.

And is that actually occurring? Yes...

• Amazon accounts for 52% of all U.S. book sales, 43 percent of all online commerce, and 45 percent of the fast-growing cloud-computing market. The Seattle-based company has put most brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business, and last year had online sales six times higher than those of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Home Depot, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and Costco combined! The self-proclaimed “Everything Store” has absorbed many of its competitors, buying the largest online shoe retailer (Zappos), the most popular live-streaming video platform (Twitch), and the market leader in baby products (Diapers.com). When the latter initially refused to sell, Amazon simply slashed its prices for its own baby products until Diapers.com capitulated.
• Facebook boasts 2 billion active users—more than a quarter of the human race. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw a social media threat from Instagram and WhatsApp, he spent $20 billion to buy them. A third social media competitor, Snapchat, rejected an offer of $3 billion, so Facebook launched a feature on Instagram essentially replicating Snapchat’s self-deleting videos and photos. Within a year, Instagram Stories has already attracted more daily users than its rival.
• Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acquires an average of one company a week. More than 1 billion people worldwide use Gmail. For Google, Amazon, and Facebook’s stockholders and executives, this staggering level of success has created enormous wealth, and the companies’ customers benefit from the unprecedented convenience their various services provide.

The domination of these tech giants also has produced plenty of losers, such as:

• The newspaper industry is one example. Facebook and Google control more than 70% of the $73 billion digital advertising market in the U.S. Many of those dollars used to go to media companies: Between 2006 and 2016, U.S. newspaper advertising revenue plummeted from $50 billion to $18 billion, and the number of jobs in the industry has been cut by more than half, from 411,000 in 2001 to 174,000 in 2016. Journalism websites, too, are struggling to survive, because Facebook and Google eat up most of the online ad dollars.
• Department stores and malls are another example. Hundreds of major retail stores have shut their doors because of the shift to online shopping, and dozens of malls have gone dark or are half empty. That, in turn, has damaged the vitality of downtowns and surrounding communities. “The communities wither away, and they never come back,” said Howard Davidowitz, an investment banker and consultant to the retail industry.

Is there any pushback? What do you think... in the U.S., not much. The U.S. government generally has used a light hand in regulating tech companies, so as not to stifle innovation and growth in what is now our fastest-growing industry.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon argue that they’re not true monopolies, because their much smaller competitors are only a click away—something that wasn’t the case with, say, AT&T before it was broken up. And the Big Tech beasts spend vast sums keeping lawmakers on their side: Facebook alone poured $3.2 million into federal lobbying in one quarter alone. But this is neither true nor fair to the American public.

Ultimately, consumers will have to rebel en masse against these companies before U.S. lawmakers or regulators will take any action—and there’s no sign that will happen, so one of my New Year's resolutions will be to figure out a way to contact elected officials and educate you as to how the Internet actually works and why Big Tech needs regulation.

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Each year I identify the Top Internet Jargon of the Year, the Top Internet Acronym of the Year, the worthy terms that made the Top 10 List, and 5 online trends to look for in the coming year. 

The Internet term of 2018 is brain hacking, and the Top Internet Acronym of the Year is NSFW – Not Safe For Work; the rest of the list includes: clap back, co-working, FIRE, woke, lawnmower parent, QAnon, #TFA and blockchain. Check it out! HOW MANY HAVE YOU HEARD OF?

Everyone's talking tech this year, from POTUS to Congress and Millennials to Big Tech. Here are the Top 10 Internet Terms for 2018. Explanations of the linked terms are on NetLingo.com:

1. brain hacking - 2018 Jargon of the Year, big tech is hooking us by making smartphones a habit, even Silicon Valley is ditching their devices due to Internet addiction, digital detox and child tech addiction. ADULTS: Please take this 8-question quiz, and for your KIDS: please ask them this 12-question quiz. The term "brain hacking" comes from hijacking peoples' minds to form a habit and it specifically refers to the way Silicon Valley is engineering smartphones, apps and social media to get us hooked, and to get you and your family to feel the need to check in constantly. You know when you're on a mobile social media site and you pull down on the news feed to get it to refresh, and you see that little circle scrolling clockwise... that's called the pull-down refresh and the guy who invented it, is sorry he did because people are now addicted. Read the full story here.

2. NSFW - 2018 Acronym of the Year "Not Safe For Work" from post-#MeToo movements to celebrities tweeting “NSFW headlines” it inspired the new book “NSFW: The Little Black Book of Acronyms”

3. clap back - If Oxford’s word is toxic, then the twitterverse is clapping back… it’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s never been used more than NOW as influencers continue to perfect the art of the clapback, thx Ja Rule

4. co-working – sharing workplaces, it’s a millennial trend with co-living and co-sharing; working in the industry and living in urban areas is impacting people’s lives and creating new business opportunities

5. FIRE – it means "Financial Independence, Retire Early" bravo to millennial crusaders who are geeking out calculating compound interest and blowing up the whole concept of career and retirement

6. woke – young and old are becoming aware, like a man who’s a feminist, or a person's awareness of current affairs, it implies knowledge and empathy as in "You’re woke, so now things are, you know, real."

7. lawnmower parent – first tiger, then elephant, helicopter, dolphin, attachment, free-range,  lawnmowers "mow down" a path for their snowflakes removing all obstacles that may cause a struggle

8. QAnon – what started as a cryptic post grew into a sprawling alternative theory about all things fake

9. #TFA – Omarosa said “they'd just hashtag it ‘TFA’ and move on when Trump did something insane,” it refers to the Twenty Fifth Amendment, as in the removal of the POTUS in the event of impairment…

10. blockchain – the muscle behind bitcoin (which Scrabble just added) it makes bitcoin transactions secure, reliable, and anonymous, it fueled a cryptocurrency craze and helps with ocean plastic too!

Read more about the bold terms on NetLingo.com and the Top 5 Online Trends to Watch in 2019:
1. deepfake / facial recognition / faceprint – OMG deepfake wait until you see the photo
2. social credit / social scoring / reputation score – scary stuff from China, wait it’s from big tech too
3. AI / artificial intelligence / machine learning / robotics – unbelievable developments
4. YIMBY & JOMO - Yes In My Back Yard & Joy Of Missing Out – new attitude (not NIMBY & FOMO)
5. CBD –  yes, as in the oil, it’s not an actual acronym because it stands for Cannabidiol

The Top 10 Internet Terms of the Year, compiled by Erin Jansen, founder of NetLingo.com
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