29th March 2016 – Brian’s Musings #4 – America’s Digital Colonisation of the World
When we were at school we learned how intrepid sailors, soldiers and settlers ventured forth to conquer and settle foreign lands. The local natives they dispossessed by force of arms and germs never understood that their experience was just one small incident in Europe’s colonisation of the world. Just as today most of us are unaware of America’s digital colonisation of the world.
I suppose it all started about fifty years ago as the American credit card companies – Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diners – fanned out across the globe. Between them they have signed up billions of merchants and consumers. In recent years Paypal, another American company, has joined the payment fray. While it’s hard to get current, accurate information on credit and debit card usage, there are more than one hundred billion card transactions a year worldwide worth well over three trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money – and a lot of valuable data on vendors, customers and their interactions being collected along the way.
Those of you old enough will remember that back in the late 1980’s there was a Goliath and David encounter between IBM and Microsoft as to whose operating system would be used in PCs. We all know that Bill Gates and his merry men slew the giant. Today various versions of Windows are installed on more than 90% of the 1.5 billion PCs in operation. I’m not sure how stringent Microsoft has been in collecting information on the ownership of all these PCs, but most connect to the Internet anyway and regularly feed back their status – and what else? – to home base in Redmond.
In the beginning it looked like the cell phone industry was going to be a non-American dominated event. Nokia and Erickson in Europe took a large chunk of the original cell phone market, while Canada’s Blackberry pioneered smart phones. Today Asian manufactured phones predominate. However under each touch screen, the operating system is invariably supplied by either Google or Apple.
The Alexa website lists the world’s most used websites. The top ten are dominated by American companies with a handful of Chinese websites interspersed. Top of the list Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day worldwide. As of the fourth quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.59 billion monthly active users who had logged in to Facebook during the previous thirty days. According to recent industry figures, Amazon is the leading e-retailer in the United States with more than US$ 107 billion in 2015 net sales via more than 304 million active customer accounts worldwide.
In the empires of old the colonies sent back jewels and spices, food and raw materials to merchants in the motherlands who grew rich and fat on the proceeds. Today it’s data in huge quantities that is shipped back. Data mining techniques allow today’s empire builders to know more about the world’s personal and business trivia than even the colonies themselves. Already Google and Facebook are using it to corner the growing online advertising market. And it was just a year or so ago that the credit card companies stopped Russian retail activity in its tracks during the Ukraine stand-off. What next?
When we were at school we learned how intrepid sailors, soldiers and settlers ventured forth to conquer and settle foreign lands. The local natives they dispossessed by force of arms and germs never understood that their experience was just one small incident in Europe’s colonisation of the world. Just as today most of us are unaware of America’s digital colonisation of the world.
I suppose it all started about fifty years ago as the American credit card companies – Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Diners – fanned out across the globe. Between them they have signed up billions of merchants and consumers. In recent years Paypal, another American company, has joined the payment fray. While it’s hard to get current, accurate information on credit and debit card usage, there are more than one hundred billion card transactions a year worldwide worth well over three trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money – and a lot of valuable data on vendors, customers and their interactions being collected along the way.
Those of you old enough will remember that back in the late 1980’s there was a Goliath and David encounter between IBM and Microsoft as to whose operating system would be used in PCs. We all know that Bill Gates and his merry men slew the giant. Today various versions of Windows are installed on more than 90% of the 1.5 billion PCs in operation. I’m not sure how stringent Microsoft has been in collecting information on the ownership of all these PCs, but most connect to the Internet anyway and regularly feed back their status – and what else? – to home base in Redmond.
In the beginning it looked like the cell phone industry was going to be a non-American dominated event. Nokia and Erickson in Europe took a large chunk of the original cell phone market, while Canada’s Blackberry pioneered smart phones. Today Asian manufactured phones predominate. However under each touch screen, the operating system is invariably supplied by either Google or Apple.
The Alexa website lists the world’s most used websites. The top ten are dominated by American companies with a handful of Chinese websites interspersed. Top of the list Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day worldwide. As of the fourth quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.59 billion monthly active users who had logged in to Facebook during the previous thirty days. According to recent industry figures, Amazon is the leading e-retailer in the United States with more than US$ 107 billion in 2015 net sales via more than 304 million active customer accounts worldwide.
In the empires of old the colonies sent back jewels and spices, food and raw materials to merchants in the motherlands who grew rich and fat on the proceeds. Today it’s data in huge quantities that is shipped back. Data mining techniques allow today’s empire builders to know more about the world’s personal and business trivia than even the colonies themselves. Already Google and Facebook are using it to corner the growing online advertising market. And it was just a year or so ago that the credit card companies stopped Russian retail activity in its tracks during the Ukraine stand-off. What next?
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