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Hurun found that Beijing had welcomed 32 new billionaires since last year, allowing it to vault past New York which it calculated only saw four new billionaires.

Overall, China has overtaken the US as the country with the highest number of billionaires. However, the top 10 billionaires in Hurun's list is still dominated by Americans.

He told the AP news agency that it could be due to Chinese market regulators allowing a flood of new share issues after holding back Initial Public Offerings for several years.

But he has not cracked the top 10 billionaires in Hurun's list, which is dominated by Americans. It is topped by Bill Gates with a net worth of $80bn, followed by investor Warren Buffett with $68bn.

However, other countries, including Saudi Arabia also have extremely cheap, subsidised petrol prices.

Food and petrol price increases in 1989 sparked nationwide protests that resulted in scores of deaths, unrest that is considered to have paved the way for the late President Hugo Chavez's rise to power.

Venezuela's economy has been pushed to the brink by the collapse in the oil price, which accounts for about 95% of the country's export revenues.

The economy shrank 10% last year, amid rampant inflation and shortages of some basic products,

According to the Bloomberg news agency, the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela incurred $15.2bn in costs in 2013 to maintain Venezuela's fuel subsidy.

Investors have become increasingly concerned about Venezuela's potential default on its huge debts.

For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little?

Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.

Now that Amazon has hit this point, it’s difficult to see how any other retailer could catch up anytime soon. I recently asked a couple of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have previously made huge investments in e-commerce whether they were keen to spend any more in the sector. They weren’t, citing Amazon.

“The truth is they’re building a really insurmountable infrastructure that I don’t see how others can really deal with,”

Amazon also faces a wider set of competitive threats internationally. Although it has reported increasingly brisk sales in India, the company has had a difficult time breaking into the lucrative Chinese market, where Alibaba dominates the shopping scene

Walmart, which on Tuesday published earnings that came in slightly above analysts’ expectations, is also spending billions to slow Amazon’s roll. But Walmart said that in its latest quarter, e-commerce sales had grown only 10 percent from a year ago. Amazon’s retail sales rose 20 percent during the same period.

What has been key to this rise, and missing from many of his competitors’ efforts, is patience. In a very old-fashioned manner, one that is far out of step with a corporate world in which milestones are measured every three months, Amazon has been willing to build its empire methodically and at great cost over almost two decades, despite skepticism from many sectors of the business world.

Amazon has built more than 100 warehouses from which to package and ship goods, and it hasn’t really slowed its pace in establishing more. Because the warehouses speed up Amazon’s shipping, encouraging more shopping, the costs of these centers is becoming an ever-smaller fraction of Amazon’s operations.

Amazon’s investments in Prime, the $99-a-year service that offers free two-day shipping, are also paying off. Last year Mr. Bezos told me that people were increasingly signing up for Prime for the company’s media offerings

Mr. Schachter, of Macquarie Securities, estimates that there will be at least 40 million Prime subscribers by the end of this year, and perhaps as many as 60 million, up from an estimated 30 million at the beginning of 2015

he predicted that by 2020, 50 percent of American households will have joined Prime, “and that’s very conservative,” he said.

its operating margin on the North American retail business was 3.5 percent, while Amazon Web Services’s margin was 25 percent.

“retail gross profit dollars per customer” — a fancy way of measuring how much Amazon makes from each shopper — has accelerated in each of the last four quarters, in part because of Prime. Amazon keeps winning “a larger share of customers’ wallets,” the firm said, eventually “leading to a period of sustained, rising profitability.”

“The thing about retail is, the consumer has near-perfect information,” said Paul Vogel, an analyst at Barclays. “So what’s the differentiator at this point? It’s selection. It’s service. It’s convenience. It’s how easy it is to use their interface. And Amazon’s got all this stuff already. How do you compete with that? I don’t know, man. It’s really hard.

To achieve this goal, countries that signed on to the agreement promised that they would focus on cultivating clean, renewable energy sources and shift from the use of fossil fuels. They will also be required to report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years.

The deal also commits countries to deliver $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries by 2020, with a promise to increase financing in the future.

In a preamble, the deal doubles down on a pledge made six years ago, that richer, industrialized countries will contribute at least $100 billion of aid a year to poorer nations to help them battle the effects of climate change by 2020. It also promises that countries will consider increases to that amount in the future.

So there may be many vested parties with a stake in the climate change deal -- but there are also a few key winners and losers. We take a look at them here:

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's (IDMC) 2015 Global Estimates report, "an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards" since 2008. These threatened populations are largely found in developing countries, which tend to be more vulnerable to rises in sea level, droughts, and floods.

The climate accord in Paris, however, have many in the developing world cheering.

According to President Obama, the targets are bold, but they also empower "businesses, scientists, engineers, workers, and the private sector -- investors -- to work together."

Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser from the disaster relief agency Christian Aid, told CBS News that this is one of the most important aspects of the COP21 accord: the promise provides poorer nations with the "assurance that the international community will not leave developing countries to deal with climate impact."

Some nations were not entirely satisfied with the final language -- there is still, after all, no legally binding provision that holds industrialized countries to this pledge for "adaptation" funds -- but nonetheless, Adow said, it gives significant hope to those countries hit especially hard with the threat of displaced citizens.

In fact, the aid money already seems to be flowing in light of the Paris negotiations: early this week, the U.S. promised to double its own aid to affected countries to $861 million as part of last-ditch efforts to push the climate deal through.

The effects of climate change in poor and developing nations also pose an increasing terror threat to the United States -- a connection that President Obama has made in the past, when he called global warming "an economic and security imperative" just weeks after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.

As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders explained it on CBS' "Face the Nation" in November: "If we are going to see an increase in drought, in flood, and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that people all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources... When people migrate into cities and they don't have jobs, there's going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now."

Military reports have also viewed climate change as a "catalyst for conflict," and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review last year dubbed its effects as "threat multipliers" that ultimately lead to "conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

But the climate change deal seeks to mitigate these possible conflict catalysts so that "countries that don't have the resources to address these problems head on, now will," Jon Powers, who served the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer and Special Advisor on Energy to the U.S. Army in the Obama Administration, told CBS News.

One important target put forth by the deal was to ensure that parties would "undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century."

Here, the deal aims to strangle heavy carbon-emitting industries -- the "anthropogenic emissions" -- and cut down on total fossil fuels burned worldwide. Importantly, it's also a nod to investment in and development of new technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air.

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told CNBC in an interview, "We recognize fossil fuels will continue to be a part of the portfolio for quite a long time," but that the popularity of other power sources are on the rise.

"Wind energy has gone up by several fold just in the last five to six years," Moniz said, "and now (wind) provides about 4.5 percent of our electricity. You add that with solar, we're talking 5 percent."

Kathleen McLaughlin, the chief sustainability officer for Walmart, said in a statement that the company would "support the U.N.'s call for the U.S. corporate sector to commit to science-based targets to reduce emissions."

Ahead of the Paris summit, China -- the world's biggest coal consumer -- said it would aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly two-thirds of its 2005 levels. In the past, international monitoring of those numbers would have been difficult to do, but the COP21 deal changes that.

The agreement holds nations accountable for reporting their progress on their climate goals in a global "stocktake" every five years starting in 2023. It also means countries will be monitoring, verifying and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions in a single accounting system.

According to one report released last month by the carbon investment think tank Carbon Tracker, fossil fuel companies could risk over $2 trillion dollars of current and future projects being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels narrows with recent global climate change action.

On Wednesday, the board announced that Yahoo would pursue a spinoff of its core Internet business instead, leaving the Alibaba stock in the old company

Although Yahoo’s board said it still believed that the company would prevail in any tax dispute, too many people on Wall Street were worried that challenging Uncle Sam over a possible $10 billion tax bill was just too big a risk, and those fears were depressing Yahoo’s stock price.

Mr. Webb said that after a day and a half of meetings, the nine-member board concluded that it could minimize the tax bill and achieve the same goal — separating the Alibaba investment from the rest of Yahoo — by reversing the direction of the transaction.

The new Yahoo will be two companies: One will have a 15 percent stake in Alibaba, and the other will have everything else, including search, email, the Tumblr social media service, various sites like Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo’s $8.7 billion stake in Yahoo Japan.

Many details of the new spinoff plan remain to be worked out, including who will run the Alibaba shell company and whether the new transaction will incur taxes.

The change in approach comes at a cost: It will add at least a year and a host of complexities to what was already a difficult process.

Mr. Webb said the board determined that another alternative — selling the company — was not the right choice.

"Haiti's high-stakes presidential, legislative and local elections got off to a slow start Sunday, with long lines forming outside of voting centers well before the 6 a.m. start time.

'No voting two times!'

"The field is so crowded and confusing that there's little clarity about who might be leading; polls have been unreliable and contradictory.

Valeant — which makes a wide range of drugs, including the antidepressant Wellbutrin an

d antifungal Jublia — is one of a number of drug companies known for buying other pharmaceutical companies and then raising prices on their drugs, sometimes by huge amounts. As we reported earlier this week, the company's business practices have been under scrutiny:

Valeant has found itself in even deeper trouble because of a campaign by short-sellers, investors who place bets that a stock will fail.

For years, Ms. Winfrey has helped make countless little-known brands wildly successful by endorsing them through one of the media ventures that made her a billionaire. But this is the first time she has made such an investment in a public company.

This year, Weight Watchers announced plans to cut roughly $100 million in additional costs and laid off the president of its North American business.After 10 straight quarters of declining sales, the stock had slumped 73 percent, to $6.79 on Friday.

Only one analyst out of eight had encouraged investors to buy shares of Weight Watchers. But that did not stop Ms. Winfrey.

Her successful endorsement of products through her annual list of favorite things so often produced skyrocketing sales and popularity that the result was called the “Oprah Effect.” Spanx, an undergarment used to make women look slimmer, was on the list in 2000, giving the then-unknown product national fame and helping turn its founder, Sara Blakely, into a billionaire.

Ms. Winfrey is expected to bring some major gravitas to Weight Watchers’ marketing department. She agreed to offer her name and face to Weight Watchers and no other weight-loss products for five years with the option to renew afterward, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company already has a picture of Ms. Winfrey on its website home page.But it is unclear whether Ms. Winfrey’s backing can help Weight Watchers expand outside of its core demographic and attract younger users, according to R. J. Hottovy, an analyst at Morningstar.

The company agreed to issue Ms. Winfrey 6.4 million shares of common stock for $43.2 million, with the option to purchase an additional 3.5 million shares, the regulatory filing showed.

“Bro culture is a dynamic that’s been creating men-only environments in their most toxic form by encouraging bad behaviors, from excessive drinking to heavy sexualized talk, that excludes women and any person who doesn’t support those behaviors,” Ms. Cooper says.

She adds that it isn’t just women whom bro culture excludes. It’s anyone who doesn’t want to participate in these kinds of behaviors. “Very few people enjoy those things, but they don’t want to stand up to the popular crowd making the rules,” she says. “I like beer pong as much as the next person, but I don’t want to do it at work. “

Perhaps the biggest efforts involve separating work from alcohol. Stories abound in Silicon Valley about networking events that happen late into the night at alcohol- and drug-fueled parties

“Changing culture is all about these kinds of micro moments,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab who has conducted research on troubling workplace behavior in the tech industry. “It is the micro moments that will become the macro and change the norms of professionalism.”

In 2017, Pipeline Angels announced an alcohol-free policy. It came about when Pipeline Angels’ founder, Natalia Oberti Noguera, attended a tech conference where the host announced an impromptu “drunk talk” on stage. It’s a fairly common tactic in Silicon Valley, with the idea being that a volunteer from the audience will drink a lot and then give a talk in the hopes that alcohol will make that person more vulnerable and more forthcoming.

“Do you know who volunteered to give the drunk talk? A white guy,” Ms. Oberti Noguera says. She didn’t see that as surprising given the potential reputational risks of getting drunk for someone other than a white man.

“We’re already vulnerable,” she says. “It’s not safe in terms of our reputation for a woman, a man of color or a nonbinary person to get drunk and give a drunk talk at a professional event. And so I thought I can take someone else’s mistake and make it a best practice. Now all our events, including meals and evening receptions, are alcohol-free.”

“Something like 90% of VC investors are men,” Ms. Nelson says. “Only 2% of VC dollars go to women. That’s the definition of bro culture—men supporting men, opening doors for one another and making those connections.”

“We’re opening doors for people that weren’t open before,” she says. “You can really have whatever kind of culture you want. It’s up to us to determine what that is.”

Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

Facebook has never sold its user data, fearful of user backlash and wary of handing would-be competitors a way to duplicate its most prized asset. Instead, internal documents show, it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.

Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections

Data privacy experts disputed Facebook’s assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.

“I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user,” said Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook. “No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”

Few companies have better data than Facebook and its rival, Google, whose popular products give them an intimate view into the daily lives of billions of people — and allow them to dominate the digital advertising market

The partnerships were so important that decisions about forming them were vetted at high levels, sometimes by Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, Facebook officials said. While many of the partnerships were announced publicly, the details of the sharing arrangements typically were confidential

as the social network has disclosed its data sharing deals with other kinds of businesses — including internet companies such as Yahoo — Facebook has labeled them integration partners, too

Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.”

The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.

Facebook, in turn, used contact lists from the partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei — which has been flagged as a security threat by American intelligence officials — to gain deeper insight into people’s relationships and suggest more connections, the records show.

agreements with about a dozen companies did. Some enabled partners to see users’ contact information through their friends — even after the social network, responding to complaints, said in 2014 that it was stripping all applications of that power.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit privacy research group, said that Facebook would have little power over what happens to users’ information after sharing it broadly. “It travels,” Ms. Dixon said. “It could be customized. It could be fed into an algorithm and decisions could be made about you based on that data.”

Facebook’s agreement with regulators is a result of the company’s early experiments with data sharing. In late 2009, it changed the privacy settings of the 400 million people then using the service, making some of their information accessible to all of the internet. Then it shared that information, including users’ locations and religious and political leanings, with Microsoft and other partners.

But the privacy program faced some internal resistance from the start, according to four former Facebook employees with direct knowledge of the company’s efforts. Some engineers and executives, they said, considered the privacy reviews an impediment to quick innovation and growth. And the core team responsible for coordinating the reviews — numbering about a dozen people by 2016 — was moved around within Facebook’s sprawling organization, sending mixed signals about how seriously the company took it, the ex-employees said.

Microsoft officials said that Bing was using the data to build profiles of Facebook users on Microsoft servers. They declined to provide details, other than to say the information was used in “feature development” and not for advertising. Microsoft has since deleted the data, the officials said.

For some advocates, the torrent of user data flowing out of Facebook has called into question not only Facebook’s compliance with the F.T.C. agreement, but also the agency’s approach to privacy regulation.

“We brought Facebook under the regulatory authority of the F.T.C. after a tremendous amount of work. The F.T.C. has failed to act.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

Facebook records show Yandex had access in 2017 to Facebook’s unique user IDs even after the social network stopped sharing them with other applications, citing privacy risks. A spokeswoman for Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraine’s security service of funneling its user data to the Kremlin, said the company was unaware of the access

In October, Facebook said Yandex was not an integration partner. But in early December, as The Times was preparing to publish this article, Facebook told congressional lawmakers that it was

But federal regulators had reason to know about the partnerships — and to question whether Facebook was adequately safeguarding users’ privacy. According to a letter that Facebook sent this fall to Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, PricewaterhouseCoopers reviewed at least some of Facebook’s data partnerships.

The first assessment, sent to the F.T.C. in 2013, found only “limited” evidence that Facebook had monitored those partners’ use of data. The finding was redacted from a public copy of the assessment, which gave Facebook’s privacy program a passing grade over all.

Mr. Wyden and other critics have questioned whether the assessments — in which the F.T.C. essentially outsources much of its day-to-day oversight to companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers — are effective. As with other businesses under consent agreements with the F.T.C., Facebook pays for and largely dictated the scope of its assessments, which are limited mostly to documenting that Facebook has conducted the internal privacy reviews it claims it had

Facebook officials said that while the social network audited partners only rarely, it managed them closely.

beachfront property is not necessarily declining in value. Rather, the studies suggest that more-exposed properties — including properties that have not yet experienced direct flooding — simply are not appreciating as rapidly as their inland neighbors.

A large part of that rise has come in the last 25 years, said Norm Levine, director of the Lowcountry Hazards Center at the College of Charleston. As a result, roughly 1 percent of buildings in the Charleston area are now seeing annual flooding, Levine said. “Our 50-year estimate is that it will be 15 percent of the inventory of buildings.”

Owen Tyler, the managing broker of the Cassina Group, a realty company that sells million-dollar-plus historic homes in Charleston, agrees. Home buyers are asking increasingly savvy questions about flooding, Tyler said, “a dramatic change from three years ago or five years ago.

“I definitely feel like something has changed,” Boineau said when asked about sea level rise and whether flooding in Charleston is getting worse. “And I think that we all have a lot to be concerned about.”

Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, is pushing to end its dependence on oil revenues. That plan will largely depend on Saudi Arabia—a country with a Byzantine bureaucracy and an opaque legal system—becoming more attractive to foreign investors.

He is creating a new and vibrant Saudi Arabia,” said one of the billboards, sponsored by a Saudi consulting firm.

Billboards touting Prince Mohammed as the face of change in the kingdom could be seen in the streets of London.

But the two leaders, Prince Mohammed and Mrs. May, will also have to address difficult issues like the Saudi war in Yemen.

he added that “we are all concerned about the appalling humanitarian situation in Yemen,” but said that engaging with the Saudi leadership was the best way to get aid into the country.

Britain has deployed the monarchy as a tool of soft power with the Gulf’s Arab states before. Prince Charles has traveled frequently to Saudi Arabia—on one occasion even participating in the traditional Saudi sword dance.

But Prince Mohammed’s visit also underscores the stark differences between the two monarchies.

On a continent that has been torn apart more than once by cataclysmic wars, many countries have built in safeguards against political extremes. But the question for Italy — and all of Europe — is how much longer these protections will hold.

Germany has a highly decentralized, consensus-based system. France has a two-step election that allows its citizens first to vote their hearts, and then their heads. Advertisement Continue reading the main story And Italy has its mess.

In an era of increasingly autocratic leaders — with anti-Democratic forces sweeping up furious voters across Europe — some politicians have whispered privately that although the results of the election may be disastrous for the country’s efforts at modernization, they may be preferable for European leaders and investors afraid of a populist government.

It also foregrounds a key imbalance in our politics: While capital can strike on a whim and effectively shut down a political program or initiative, labor’s ability to similarly assert itself in the public sphere is comparatively limited.

There are no regulations or laws preventing or even restricting capital strikes. This means that the social and political aspirations of capital always have an effective instrument on hand. But the same can’t be said for labor

All over the United States, euphemistically titled right-to-work laws strangle organized labor, preventing the kind of coordination among workers that allows for effective striking. Then there are anti-strike laws, some of which fine public-sector unions huge amounts for going on strike, while others criminalize striking for individual workers. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is in the midst of deciding a conservative-backed case against public-sector unions that, if successful, could weaken American labor even further

Normally, this capital-financed onslaught against labor is interpreted as capital just doing what it does: trying to squeeze maximal profits out of business transactions, workers be damned. And it is that

But in light of the power of capital strikes in public life, it should also be understood as something else: an effort to limit the ability of labor to exert the same kind of control over politics and discourse as capital itself does

He also alarmed various constituencies when, contrary to campaign pledges, he spoke of increasing taxes and when he questioned a proposed partnership between the Brazilian airplane manufacturer Embraer and Boeing, and when he suggested he would allow an American military base on Brazilian soil. His chief of staff said the president was “wrong” on the tax increase, Embraer stock tumbled and generals were reportedly unhappy.

Much will also depend on Mr. Bolsonaro’s ability to deliver on sorely needed economic reforms. That test begins in February, when the new Congress convenes — the president commands only an unstable coalition of several parties, and he is bound to encounter strong opposition to his reforms. A fateful year has begun for Brazil.

That may not be true in the future: If market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained. “The impact on innovation can be the most important competitive effect” in an antitrust case

Yet Google’s monopoly means some features and prices that competitors offered never made it in front of customers. Yelp Inc., which in 2004 began aggregating detailed information and user reviews of local services, such as restaurants and stores, claims Google altered its search results to hurt Yelp and help its own competing service. While Yelp survived, it has retreated from Europe, and several similar local search services have faded.

When the federal government sued to break up Standard Oil, the Supreme Court acknowledged business acumen was important to the company’s early success, but concluded that was eventually supplanted by a single-minded determination to drive others out of the market.

Standard Oil and AT&T used trusts, regulations and patents to keep out or co-opt competitors. They were respected but unloved.

By contrast, Google and Facebook give away their main product, while Amazon undercuts traditional retailers so aggressively it may be holding down inflation. None enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly; all invest prodigiously in new products.

All are among the public’s most loved brands, according to polls by Morning Consult.

Yet there are also important parallels. The monopolies of old and of today were built on proprietary technology and physical networks that drove down costs while locking in customers, erecting formidable barriers to entry.

. If they’re imposing a cost, it may not be what customers pay but the products they never see.

In a 2005 paper, Mr. Scherer found that Standard Oil was indeed a prolific generator of patents in its early years, but that slowed once it achieved dominance.

Amazon hasn’t yet reached the same market share as Google or Facebook but its position is arguably even more impregnable because it enjoys both physical and technological barriers to entry. Its roughly 75 fulfillment centers and state-of-the art logistics (including robots) put it closer, in time and space, to customers than any other online retailer.

“Just like people joined Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook, the biggest competitive advantage AT&T had was that it was interconnected,”

Early in the 20th century, AT&T began buying up local competitors and refusing to connect independent exchanges to its long-distance lines, arousing antitrust complaints. By the 1920s, it was allowed to become a monopoly in exchange for universal service in the communities it served. By 1939, the company carried more than 90% of calls.

After AT&T was broken up into separate local and long-distance companies in 1982, telecommunication innovation blossomed, spreading to digital switching, fiber optics, cellphones—and the internet.

when Google launched its own comparison business, Google Shopping, those sites found themselves dropping deeper into Google’s search results. They accused Google of changing its algorithm to favor its own results. The company responded that its algorithm was designed to give customers the results they want.

At that same hearing Jeffrey Katz, then the chief executive of Nextag, responded, “That is like saying move to Panama if you don’t like the tax rate in America. It’s a fake choice because no one has Google’s scope or capabilities and consumers won’t, don’t, and in fact can’t jump.”

In 2013 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded that even if Google had hurt competitors, it was to serve consumers better, and declined to bring a case. Since then, comparison sites such as Nextag have largely faded.

The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.

Internet platforms have high fixed and minimal operating costs, which favors consolidation into a few deep-pocketed competitors. And the more customers a platform has, the more useful it is to each individual customer—the “network effect.”

But a platform that confers monopoly in one market can be leveraged to dominate another. Facebook’s existing user base enabled it to become the world’s largest photo-sharing site through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the largest instant-messaging provider through its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. It is also muscling into virtual reality through its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014 and anonymous polling with its purchase of TBH last year.

Once a company like Google or Facebook has critical mass, “the venture capital looks elsewhere,” says Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm. “There’s no point taking on someone with a three or four years head start.”

“There should be hundreds of Yelps. There’s not. No one is pitching investors to build a service that relies on discovery through Facebook or Google to grow, because venture capitalists think it’s a poor bet.”

As the dominant platform for third-party online sales, Amazon also has access to data it can use to decide what products to sell itself. In 2016 Capitol Forum, a news service that investigates anticompetitive behavior, reported that when a shopper views an Amazon private-label clothing brand, the accompanying list of items labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” is also dominated by Amazon’s private-label brands. This, it says, restricts competing sellers’ access to a prime marketing space

In the face of such accusations, the probability of regulatory action—for now—looks low, largely because U.S. regulators have a relatively high bar to clear: Do consumers suffer?

“We think consumer welfare is the right standard,” Bruce Hoffman, the FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, recently told a panel on antitrust law and innovation. “We have tried other standards. They were dismal failures.”

What would remedies look like? Since Big Tech owes its network effects to data, one often-proposed fix is to give users ownership of their own data: the “social graph” of connections on Facebook, or their search history on Google and Amazon. They could then take it to a competitor.

A more drastic remedy would be to block acquisitions of companies that might one day be a competing platform. British regulators let Facebook buy Instagram in part because Instagram didn’t sell ads, which they argued made them different businesses. In fact, Facebook used Instagram to engage users longer and thus sell more ads

Ben Thompson, wrote in his technology newsletter Stratechery. Building a network is “extremely difficult, but, once built, nearly impregnable. The only possible antidote is another network that draws away the one scarce resource: attention.” Thus, maintaining competition on the internet requires keeping “social networks in separate competitive companies.”

How sound are these premises? Google’s and Facebook’s access to that data and network effects might seem like an impregnable barrier, but the same appeared to be true of America Online’s membership, Yahoo ’s search engine and Apple’s iTunes store, note two economists, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, in a recent paper. All saw their dominance recede in the face of disruptive competition.

It’s possible Microsoft might have become the dominant company in search and mobile without the scrutiny the federal antitrust case brought. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have often needed the government’s help to dislodge a monopolist—and may one day need it again.

“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.

There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”

“This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,”

“The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them,

He also echoed the words of world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he said the tech giants had become “obstacles to innovation” that need to be regulated as public utilities “aimed at preserving competition, innovation and fair and open universal access”.

Earlier this week, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company because it’s addictive and harmful.

In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.

On policy, however, Trump the president has differed from Trump the candidate. The candidate pledged to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He suggested spending billions on infrastructure. And he promised to “eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors.”

None of these have come to pass.

Underneath the extra-obvious demagoguery and incompetence, one year of Trump has been largely the same as one year of President Rubio or Bush or Cruz would have been. Where candidate Trump’s views on key issues differed from the GOP, President Trump has gotten on board.

And, crucially, Trump’s so-called foes in Congress reflect this gap between rhetoric and reality. Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) have sparred publicly with the president, yet they have remained reliable votes for the White House’s initiatives.

In policy terms, though, on what major issue would Romney oppose the president? They agree on taxes, health care, immigration and so on. A Sen. Romney would be a reliable vote for the Trump agenda — because it is the Republican agenda.

Republicans will nonetheless struggle to distance themselves because the past year has proved that Trumpism and Republicanism are fundamentally the same. A vote for one is a vote for both.

. A lot of the biggest players, maybe even most, were Democrats before Trump came to power. The key is they come from a place where party affiliations are more like factions in a 15th-century Italian city-state than what we think of as modern political parties. It’s about personalities, money, and power

One of the deepest dynamics of the Trump presidency is his mounting rage at his inability to control the press. To a degree, this is simply that nothing is like the national political press in scandal mode. No matter what pond you’re from or how big it was, nothing compares.

But a major part of the story is how well Trump did working and directing and playing the New York City press for decades. They ate out of his hand. All the crime and money laundering and crazy bad acts went mostly unreported in the big papers – and this is in the national media capital.