I was asked at the FT Weekend Festival a few weeks ago which industry I most expected to be disrupted next. There are many obvious answers to this finance, energy and the like. But the prime candidate for disruption is the industry we think of as being the biggest disrupter big tech.
For years the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google have had most things their own way. We mostly saw them as the good guys and any concerns we had about their cash piles, data control and filters were less relevant than the joys we were getting from one-click shopping, funny animal videos and the odd Twitter bicker. That's changing. Why? Terrorism and taxes. It has gradually dawned on all of us that there might be no "virtual caliphate" without Twitter and Facebook, that we need big companies to contribute to state coffers in a way that this lot just don't, and that taken as a whole, big tech might just be taking more than it is giving. It isn't using its power to crack down on extremism and it isn't using its wealth to pay much in the way of taxes. That makes the sector ripe for disruption by governments.
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