This year’s lockdowns triggered a huge spike in online sales of every kind, but where would that stabilise? Once things started to calm down, where would the new level be set? We’re now starting to see - over 20% of US retail sales are now online and in the UK, ecommerce is now 40% of retail sales excluding groceries.
Read MoreLots of companies in lots of industries worry that that a big tech company might be about to enter their industry and crush them. How can you tell if you’re a target?
Read MoreDoes Amazon have 40% market share, or 10%? Does Apple have 15%, or 80%? Does Google worry about Bing, or Tiktok? It depends, and it's complicated, but this determines a large part of all the tech anti-trust cases coming up in the next few years.
Read MoreWhat’s going to happen in ecommerce and retail? TV? TV ads? Retail? Brands? Online advertising? There are half a dozen huge industries where all of the cards are being thrown up in the air, and no-one really knows where they’re going to land.
Read MoreFor its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and attitudes are fragmenting.
Read MoreThe bigger Amazon gets, the more it’s worth reading the accounts. Does AWS subsidise the whole thing? Is the revenue $250bn - or $450bn? And is that ad business just a footnote, or is it bringing in more cash than AWS?
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Both the UK and (today) the USA have given official statistics on how ecommerce and retail have changed during lockdown. The headline numbers are pretty dramatic. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30% in two months, and the USA from 17% to 22%.
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The app store model has been a central part of the smartphone revolution, bringing safe, trusted software to billions of people for the first time. Breaking it would be insane. The trouble is, it also means Apple (and Google) aren’t the pirates anymore - they’re the navy, the port and the customs house, so how do they manage that, and how soon do regulators step in?
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Most of the things we worry about aren't actually competition problems, but even where they are, breakups are unlikely to be effective. The real answers are in much more detailed and micro work: in regulating the internal mechanics of these products, line by line, much as we regulate telcos or credit cards.
Read MoreWe regulate lots of industries, from food to cars to airlines, and now we’re going to regulate tech. But what does that mean? Regulating tech won’t be any more easy or simple than any other kind of policy - policy is complicated and full of trade-offs.
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