Can a handful of companies be allowed to control the internet? 

Handing over control over the pipeline of our economy and our marketplace of ideas to a handful of apolitical companies would be bad enough. But allowing companies that are militantly political and increasingly banning, censoring, and suppressing the views of more than half the country is a crisis.

That crisis is only intensifying as the control by the speech cartel grows.

The Wall Street Journal sketches out the incredible dominance of just three companies over digital advertising.

The Big Three of digital advertising—Google, Facebook and Amazon—already dominated that sector going into 2020. The pandemic pushed them into command of the entire advertising economy. According to a provisional analysis by ad agency GroupM, the three tech titans for the first time collected the majority of all ad spending in the U.S. last year…

The triopoly increased their share of the U.S. digital-ad market from 80% in 2019 to a range approaching 90% in 2020, GroupM estimates. 

That’s three companies essentially acting as the interface between customers and businesses. 

It also means that alternatives fall away as the FAANG club cannibalizes everything. Cable TV dies and that leaves most people getting programming through Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Google’s Android platforms. 

Meanwhile, the access points narrow.

The growth in online advertising last year came as every other kind of ad spending shrank, with double-digit declines in television, newspapers and billboards, according to GroupM. And those online gains flowed heavily to the tech giants rather than to digital media sites and publishers that sell online ads… As it directs more ad money to the tech giants, Mondelez isn’t working with as many digital publishers in the U.S. In 2017, Mondelez worked with about 150; it now works with fewer than 10.

What happens in the next election? What impact is the contraction and monopolization of the marketplace going to have on advertising? Especially as the Left ramps up the same effort that it’s using to pressure corporate donors to withdraw support from Republicans, will be used to push Google, Facebook, and Amazon to do what they already want to do?

That’s how a one-party state begins.