The "Four".

The "Four" are quietly little by little taking over America day by day. Each day they somehow circumnavigate the law or make ethically questionable decisions. But who are the four? Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. They are Americas #1 industrial leader in their respective fields. However each is making more and more money every quarter and there is no sight of slowing down. The combine revenue of these 4 companies in 2016 was $467 billion. If the four were a country, they would have the 25th highest GDP. The size and scale of these companies have never been seen before and are governments are not quite sure how to keep these companies under control. The L2 inc team has been covering the rise of these 4 industry giants and have several very good videos about this topic. But L2 shows how they operate and how the business field reacts to each move. This is what I learned about each of these companies.
         So lets start with Amazon. The biggest of the four by far, in terms of revenue and growth per year, has only paid 1.4 billion income tax since 2008. Compare that to Walmart, who during that same time have paid 64 billion. Amazon has had double the revenue during this time and paid 1.5% the tax Walmart had. And with mayors all across the nation looking to give tax breaks to Amazon if they build there new headquarters in their city, economist don't see this rate going up at all anytime soon.
       Apple has also several interesting ways they can work around the government, not only with taxes but with privacy. Last year, the U.S. government demanded that Apple give them a "backdoor" to access encriptied information. This was to stop terrorists and solve crimes that they were previously unable to solve. Apple denied the U.S. governments requests because they didn't feel it was in the U.S. citizens interest for the government to invade their privacy. Good or bad, this is unprecedented and put the U.S. in a difficult position. Apple is one of the few companies on this planet that can deny the U.S. government and face no repercussions.
        During the 2016 presidential election, Facebook received tons of of negative press over the spreading of "fake news" that can be paid for by anyone or anything. Several investigations found out the the government of Russia spent millions on negative ads for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This is important because in 2016, more Americans got their news from Facebook than from mainstream media sources like CNN and Fox News. Facebook has a responsibility to filter through the "fake news" because the American people have shifted the way they get their news from Facebook. And not filtering this misinformation can lead to political unrest all across the world.
      Google has quite a unique problem and it involves recommending its own products to consumers even when its not the best match for what the customer. Last year 92% of all internet searches were conducted through Google (blowing Bing and yahoo answers out of the water). For example, if I typed into google, "best phone" Google would show me its own Google phone. This is ethically challenging because they basically run a monopoly in the search engine industry so are responsible for giving every company a fair chance to be reached through their platform.
       All of these companies have one thing in common, they all are pioneers in their industry and are dominating their fields. They are becoming so big that the competition are all going out of business. New laws and restriction may be needed so they do not become too powerful. This is uncharted territory and we will see what happens in the future regarding... "The Four"

Written by: Carson Breault 

All information provided by L2 inc
https://www.youtube.com/user/l2thinktank
www.L2inc.com