DO YOU remember your first #Google search, with the world’s information at your fingertips? Or perhaps the thrill of rediscovering old friends when you opened a #Facebook account. From those heady, early days, Google and Facebook have become custodians of crucial technologies relied upon by hundreds of millions of people all over the planet. The key to their success is no secret: the services they offer are the best and so droves of people choose to use them. But with the droves comes data and with that, a new form of power. This, coupled with the fact that most users understand little about this new currency, has led some to worry that there is very little holding these companies to account. “They really control what you know and what you see. They control your universe,” says Ariel Ezrachi, who studies competition law at the University of Oxford. Is it time to rein them in? Even if we wanted to, could we?
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