Big Tech will annihilate Telcos (a weekend read!) | Gadget Guy Australia – GadgetGuy

Big Tech will annihilate Telcos. Analysts are saying that the pace of Big Tech and its role in bringing global internet to all will annihilate Telcos as we know them in the not too distant future.

Regular readers will know that we have been writing about Big Tech. Specifically, can you trust FAANG with our personal data? Well as Big Tech gets bigger, it appears that Big Tech will annihilate Telcos and that may have some dramatic privacy implications.

When it does, everything we do online, every word we speak, everywhere we go, what we buy and more will be rivers of gold to Big Tech. Is that good, bad, or inevitable?

U.S. Correspondent Sam Bocetta steps a little outside his usual comfort zone to explore some fundamental changes that may see FAANG getting its teeth into us by controlling data/internet/voice and more. Sam writes:

This article was inspired by Peter Adderton, CEO of Boost Mobile, and his startling admission to GadgetGuy, In the next five years, Telcos as we know it may not exist. We may be buying communications (voice and data) directly from Amazon (Bezos/Project Kuiper), Google (Project Loon), SpaceX (Elon Musk), OneWeb (Richard Branson), Boeing, Samsung and even Facebook (Solar-powered drones).

Yep, thats right. Although Telcos dont care to admit it, their whole house of cards business model might be about to tumble. And when push comes to shove, the dinosaur Telcos are no match for the agile Big Tech meteors that will rain down upon them.

In the beginning, we had analogue voice and data remember those old pinging modems and raspy telephones. Everything went over Telco-owned copper wire. It was relatively private as the consequences of metadata were unfathomable.

Then came the digital superhighway, and everything changed because of two letters I.P. (internet protocol). Suddenly the world started going digital. Voice became a series of 0s and 1s and transmitted as data. Metadata was born, and Big Tech started to monetise the rivers of gold it creates!

Next, we enter the world of the internet, where Big Tech rules. We use I.P. to transmit voice (VoIP), stream music/movies, email, bank/pay bills, search, research, shop, social media, news, store photos, go paperless, monitor security and baby cams, OK Google/Alexa/Siri, IoT, watch porn, gamble and move everything to the cloud (other peoples computers).

Ultimately everything ends up digitalised. This allows Big Tech to collect huge amounts of both personally identifiable data and metadata on us all. We knowingly or otherwise give up privacy to use their free or convenient services.

They are not breaking the rules there are few anyway. But the EU GDPR, California Privacy Rules and reasonable Australian privacy provisions will hopefully eventually force Big Tech to respect what should be our inalienable privacy rights.

The internet is also a dangerous place where Cybercriminals hide behind the lack of regulation. They use its anonymity to steal our data or I.D., empty bank accounts, install nefarious malware, perpetrate frauds and generally make the digital highway damned unsafe. Cybercriminals likely know more about you in your dark web profile than you do!

And then you have data-harvesting apps (almost any free app) where if the product is free, the product is you. Facebook is a data-harvester that sells access to you not a benign social media platform.

So, it comes down to who do you trust with your data? It is not about the Telcos owning copper, fibre, 2/3/4/5/6/7G (infrastructure) or Big Tech and satellites/drones. It is about how we use that infrastructure and what bullet-proof regulations protect us as we bare our very soul to the internet

So back to the prospect of Big Tech controlling communications.

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Big Tech will annihilate Telcos (a weekend read!) | Gadget Guy Australia - GadgetGuy