We’re living in a FAANG world. And, no, it’s not a vampire movie, although the metaphor of a behemoth that thrives on our data as its lifeblood might be apt.Whether you shop for shoes on Amazon, call your mom on your iPhone, click on Facebook for your news or on Netflix and chill on the weekends, FAANG impacts just about every aspect of your life.It’s an acronym for some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Add in Microsoft and you pretty much have the wealth of some nations in companies that have become superpowers unto themselves.Combined, the six have annual revenues of approximately $865 billion (U.S.), greater than the GDP of Saudi Arabia, the 18th largest economy in the world based on 2018 figures. (Canada, with a GDP of $1.7 trillion is the 10th largest world economy.) Data has become the new oil.“How dominant they’ve become has been amazing,” says professor Tyler Chamberlain of the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. “These are truly global companies. The major businesses of the past had international operations. But the scale of the digital companies is unprecedented. They have dominated like no other companies before.”Canada has certainly been a beneficiary of the tech boom. This year, Toronto was ranked as one of the top North American cities for tech talent by commercial real estate consultants CBRE. Toronto’s talent pool grew at the fastest pace of 50 markets measured, with 80,100 jobs created in the past five years, making the city the third best market in North America.Only Silicon Valley (the San Francisco Bay area) and Seattle were ranked higher for their overall talent pools.While the companies have undoubtedly created great wealth and prosperity for shareholders, the dominance of the big six has also created problems.“They have, to some, become the robber barons of the modern era,” says C ...
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