Paul Mason

The interplay between supply and demand does not come into the price of an iTunes track: the supply of the Beatles ‘Love Me Do’ on iTunes is infinite.

The small number of companies that dominate each sector is striking. In traditional sectors you have usually four to six big players in every market: the big four accountancy firms; four or five big supermarket groups; four big turbofan makers. But the signature brands of info-tech need total dominance: Google needs to be the only search company; Facebook has to be the only place you construct your online identity; Twitter where you post your thoughts; iTunes the go-to online music store. In two key markets – online search and mobile operating systems – there is a two-firm death match, with Google currently winning both of them.

Firefox, an Open Source browser, has currently around 24 per cent of the global browser market.19 A staggering 70 per cent of all smartphones run on Android, which is also technically Open Source.20 This is in part due to an overt strategy by Samsung and Google to use Open Source software to undermine Apple’s monopoly and maintain their own market position, but it does not alter the fact that the dominant smartphone on the planet runs on software nobody can own.