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What Worries? Big Tech Companies Post Glowing Quarterly Profits - The New York Times

posted onOctober 27, 2017
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Article snippet: Big technology companies are being dragged in front of Congress to answer tough questions about their impact on the 2016 presidential election, and their market power is under increasing scrutiny. But back on their home turfs, it is business as usual, as earnings reports from Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, demonstrated on Thursday. All displayed the kinds of performances that make investors happy: profit surges, big jumps in revenue — sometimes both. If revenue growth is a good indication of giving the public what it wants, customers appear to love what the biggest technology companies are offering, whether it’s cheap online storage, clothing or a social network, and the party isn’t slowing down. “If you’re looking for consumers to go after these companies, we’ll be waiting for a long time,” said Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business and the author of a recent book that examines the power of large technology companies. But to a different audience — regulators, competitors, academics — the continued show of strength by big technology companies is a further sign of the risks of their getting bigger, even if there does not appear to be much of an appetite to do anything about it in the United States. “I do not see, to be honest, anything between Amazon and a trillion-dollar market valuation except D.C. and Brussels, and at this point it looks more likely that it’s Brussels,” Mr. Ga... Link to the full article to read more

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