World must 'wake up to threat' posed by Google, Facebook, warns billionaire Media Man Int

World must 'wake up to threat' posed by Google, Facebook, warns billionaire - 24th January 2018

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Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com. Photo: Bloomberg

Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Benioff has compared the current crisis of trust facing the tech giants to the financial crisis of a decade ago, urging regulators to wake up to the threat from Google, Facebook, and the other dominant firms.

The outspoken entrepreneur accused some of the industry's most -influential bosses of "abdicating -responsibility" and being ignorant to how powerful and sophisticated they had become. Regulators now "have no choice" but to intervene, he said.

"We are in a new world. A decade ago, you had the banks talking about collaterised debt obligations and credit default swaps, saying they were great for the economy, but regulators weren't paying attention. The government needs to come in and point 'True North'," Mr Benioff said at a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Mr Benioff, founder and boss of cloud computing firm Salesforce, pointed to the way the tobacco industry and food producers had become more highly regulated.

The call was backed by Sir Martin Sorrell, who said the "Seven Sisters" - Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, -Microsoft, and China's Alibaba and Tencent - had become too big. Comparing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to a modern-day John D Rockefeller, the WPP boss, said "we are now in a position where they need to be regulated".

However, Ruth Porat, finance director of Google parent Alphabet, fought back, claiming the firm's -recent shake-up, which had resulted in it being carved up into a series of subsidiaries, "allows us to keep investing and improving the lives of billions of people".

Mr Benioff hit out at Uber, whose boss Dara Khosrowshahi was on the panel, claiming it had pursued growth above customer trust. "Trust has to be the highest value [for any company]. If not, bad things will happen," he said.

Mr Khosrowshahi said the crisis that had engulfed Uber had triggered serious reform. "The leaks and exposures started huge cultural change and a break from the past," he said.

He said Uber would be doing more to improve safety, introducing a new higher level of service that allowed customers to choose the drivers with the very best ratings. In the next decade, Uber would need to double the size of its workforce to keep up with growth, he predicted. Backing the cry for greater regulation against Silicon Valley's biggest names, Mr Khosrowshahi said: "As Google and others get larger... it is not a fair fight."

Echoing similar calls from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Sir Martin said the time had come for Google and Facebook to acknowledge they have become media companies.

Mr Benioff claimed that some tech giants had become so powerful that their own bosses were unaware of the extent to which their services were being used "nefariously".

(Telegraph, London)