”Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” i.e. ”I consider that Carthage must be destroyed” is a famous sentence attributed to the ancient orator Cato the Elder, who ended all his speaches in the Roman Senate by asking his fellow senators to declare war and seek to defeat the poweful merchants state of Carthage, which was seen as a threat to the expansion plans of Rome itself.

I remember this sentence and the stance of Cato when I see the frenzy among many (good) people, ranging from public authorities in the European Union to people in the business and the academia, making bold statements against the tech giants and the threats they would pose to the society and the economy.

It is difficult to withstand this current but I keep asking myself – and those making these claims – where are the numbers, the analysis and the consumers?  

I have no business connection to Google – but I use and pay for some of its services – so that I am free to speak out and wonder ”Que vadis?” the enforcement of the competition rules. 

Part of the blame lies with the tech giants, which tend to exaggerate, most likely for marketing purposes, what they can do.  

Concepts such as ”Artificial Intelligence” or ”machine learning” are, for the time being, just fancy words for software which is much better than in the past but which is very far from matching the true capabilities of the human brain (which is more than a bundle of memory and synapses).

It is about the time to think cool-headed of the pros and cons of the tech giants and how to put in place policies and rules which would foster innovation without sacrificing the consumers and avoiding the bottlenecks in the economy.  

PS: eventually the perseverence of Cato the Elder paid off and Carthage was erased from the face of the Earth.