That's the question John Naughton asks over in the Observer, are Apple, Amazon, Google and Oracle the new robber barons, equivalent of Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest from the last century but one? The answer is both yes and no:
What gets lost in the reality distortion field that surrounds these technology moguls is that, in the end, they are fanatically ambitious, competitive capitalists. They may look cool and have soothing bedside manners, but in the end these guys are in business not just to make money, but to establish sprawling, quasi-monopolistic commercial empires. And they will do whatever it takes to achieve those ambitions.
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Thus began the era satirised by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which was published in 1873. Twain and Warner were struck by the rampant greed and speculative frenzy of the times – not to mention its pervasive political corruption. But in that febrile milieu a smallish group of ingenious, ruthless and visionary entrepreneurs created a modern industrial state. Leland Stanford, EH Harriman, Jay Gould, Charles Crocker, Henry Plant, Henry Flagler, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Charles Yerkes built railways; John D Rockefeller created Standard Oil and brought his distinctive brand of oligopolistic order to the oil business, eventually controlling 90% of the industry; Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick and Charles Schwab created a vast steel industry; and bankers such as JP Morgan, Joseph Seligman, Andrew Mellon and Jay Cooke organised the finance that funded these huge ventures.
The yes is that yes, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Bezos, Brinn and Page, they are indeed very like Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Rockefeller. But this does not make them anything like the Robber Barons.
For there were really two groups of entrepreneurs who made it big in the American economy of the 19th century. There were those who simply did thing better, cheaper, than their competitors and thus were able to stake a claim to large parts of an economy that was becoming a national economy for the first time. Rockefeller in oil. Vanderbilt in steamships, Carnegie in steel. Sure, they competed very hard against all comers: but they did it with better technology and cheaper prices. Well, by and large they did: Rockefeller was known for cute dealings at times, as they all were, but it was still true that Rockefeller was the most efficient oil company and offered the lowest prices to consumers. Carnegie was technologically streets ahead of his competitors and so on.
The robber Barons were a rather different group: this was more a description of those who organised themselves into trust, cartels to keep out competition, and at a slightly later date too. The point here was not to win the market by beating the competition but to raise profits by restricting competition: a very different thing indeed.
I would argue that the Apples, Googles, Oracles and Amazons of this current world are more like the former. Yes, there is that sad use of IP in fighting, but by and large they are fighting each other through market competition, technological advance and ever lower prices to consumers.
There are other sectors of the economy more like the Robber Barons: those who conspire with politics to restrict entry into their markets for example. Like those 30% of jobs where you need an occupational licence these days. Or Milton Friedman's example of the way that the AMA restricts the number of doctors in order to keep wages for doctors high.
In short, we have both groups still, those who wish to profit from restricting competition and those who wish to do so by beating the competition. But our technology gurus strike me as being more those on the good side, as with Carnegie and Vanderbilt, than on the bad.
