The US Monopoly on Data

Big Data confirms itself as an unstoppable phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Awareness of the extent of this phenomenon, however, seems limited only to large companies, and in particular to American giants. Google, Facebook and Amazon, among all, thus become the undisputed masters of the “new oil”, exploiting much of the information available on the web to their advantage.

For this blog, I wanted to shed some light on how my home country (Italy) and the biggest power of the western world (the United States) compare with each other in the data industry.

How much information is produced in a minute

About 1.5 zettabytes of data pass through the network in one year. This is an immense amount of data and really difficult to imagine: just think that it can be compared to the content of 250 billion DVDs. Add to this information the awareness that 90% of the available data was created in the last 5 years.

It emerges that Big Data is an apparently unstoppable growth phenomenon: it is estimated that by 2020 1.7 MB of data will be generated for every person on earth. Every second.

Domo presents a cross-section of the data produced every minute. Most of them come from social networks like Tinder, Linkedin, Youtube, Twitter, or from entertainment platforms like Spotify and Netflix. Of course, the American giants Amazon and Google are not lacking in the infographic released by Domo.

Some examples of this impressive amount of data produced every minute are:

• 97,222 hours of video played on Netflix
• 1,111 packages delivered by Amazon
• nearly 4 million searches made on Google
• almost 50 thousand photos posted on Instagram

The data produced is no longer something immaterial, to be imagined as an abstract and valueless entity. Instead, they become a perfect user track in several moments of his life: when looking for a job (Linkedin), listening to music (Spotify) or watching a movie (Netflix), buying something(Amazon) and even when flirting with someone (Tinder). Every moment of our life now seems to produce data.

The big players: Google, Facebook and Amazon

The awareness of the importance for a company to have control over these data seems to be in the hands of a few. In particular, the American data monopoly is evident, especially when looking at large companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google.

Taking the famous social network as an example, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have already gained the importance of checking the greatest number of data on his users, buying Whatsapp (65 billion messages sent every day) and Instagram (over 100 million photos shared in one day). The information made available to users is then used for various purposes, including personalized marketing on our behavior.

Not least is Google: in this case we do not limit ourselves to the use of the search engine or to the emails sent, received and deleted, but even to the history of the positions of Google Maps, the physical activity carried out by Google Fit or voice activities linked to Google Home. A sort of Big Brother to which we ourselves turn to share our information.

Amazon also has a significant amount of data: just think of the possibility of reconstructing consumption and browsing habits of the Seattle giant, as well as knowing the user’s economic availability. Information that is then used, for example, as a basis for the recommendation engine, i.e. the method by which Amazon fills its homepage (and not only) with products that may be of interest to us.

The constant investment in technology by these companies in data means that today we are helplessly witnessing a real monopoly: according to statcounter.com, 92% of web searches are carried out through Google, 7 out of 10 interactions occur with Facebook and almost 1 in 2 online purchases involve Amazon. The growing investments are accompanied by the ability of these companies to offer services that today seem irreplaceable.

The situation in Italy

Surely a success factor on the part of these companies can be represented by investments in infrastructure, such as data centers where the big giants invest billions every year, and human capital capable of facing constant technological progress.

In Italy, the Big Data market is actually expanding, having registered a + 28% compared to the previous year. According to a research by the Digital Innovation Observatories at the end of 2018, only one in three companies has started investing in Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. 1 in 2 companies still have a traditional business model for data.

It is a question of placing a dangerous limit on one’s company, giving up what could represent one of the factors of success (if not survival) in a world that now produces data in every interaction.

The study reports that large Italian companies are equipped in their entirety with a descriptive analysis system, but only some of them are taking the first steps towards predictive and prescriptive analysis. A much more serious situation concerns SMEs, where 4 out of 10 declare that they use descriptive analyzes and only 7% have started Big Data Analytics projects.

Let’s imagine now if the big giants had given up on exploiting their data for advanced activities. In 2018, Google would have a turnover of almost 116 billion less out of 138, this is because 85% of Google’s turnover in 2018 derives precisely from targeted marketing activities made possible precisely by the exploitation of its own data in a way that goes far beyond simple descriptive analysis.

This is the value of advanced analytics for Google: 85% of turnover in 2018.