Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’