Jonathan Tepper is co-author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition.” He is chairman of Variant Perception, a macroeconomic research group catering to asset managers and co-founded Demotix, a citizen-journalism photo newswire. Tepper notes — Google and Facebook control over 70% of all search and linkage within the internet. Their algorithms are biased and guide users to go where they want them to go. Most need Google or Facebook to login to certain websites. So on a platform as vast as the internet, where is the competition? There’s a lot of smart, wealthy, entrepreneurial focused people around the world – why are they not fighting back? There is virtually no interest by people in Silicon Valley to get into the search engine game. Any small competitor that tries to insert themselves into the industry gets bought out by their larger sized competitors. Jonathan encourages capitalism and companies becoming monopolies because of organic growth. Unfortunately, this is rarely how companies grow. Monopolies are usually formed due to political advantages and strong economic footholds. Jonathan describes the economy right now as “fake capitalism.” What will it take to overturn a Google or Facebook or Amazon? Will they be dominating for the next 30 years? The central point of evolution is competition – the struggle for survival. In a perfect world, companies with the best and strongest traits would survive while the old and fat companies would die off rather than continue to thrive because of crony capitalism. Only time will tell if these mammoth sized companies will continue to push boundaries and prosper or if a younger more creative company will overthrow them. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Technology monopolies Capitalism Airline monopolies Anti trust laws Federal Reserve The banking system Fake capitalism The Antitrust Paradox Patents