The impacts of information monopoly

The question of how to encourage transformational, market-dominating innovations while limiting the abuse of market power long precedes the digital age.Despite rules prohibiting "predatory" pricing and "anti-competitive" mergers, price wars and acquisitions that increase market leaders' power are permitted in practice. 
The innovation-favoring approach has helped to make the US a nursery of world-dominating businesses, and it has not changed with the digital revolution, either. The "info-monopolists" Google and Facebook, faced with few regulatory obstacles, have created unprecedented value for consumers - and have secured massive market power for themselves.These companies have eviscerated traditional media, though many of the losers were themselves oligopolists or monopolists. 
Unimpeded growth has no doubt helped to increase the value that Google and Facebook can offer. The more Google searches are conducted, the better the results. The more people who use Facebook, the more reason there is to join. This attracts advertisers, whose payments fund investments in improved technology and added features.
But unchecked market power creates opportunities for abuse, particularly with regard to user privacy. Unlike television networks or newspapers, these digital behemoths don't merely give advertisers an audience; they tailor ads to individual consumers. This is not a benign difference, because in order to tailor ads effectively - thereby maximizing their value to advertisers (and thus profits for the platform) - these companies collect a huge amount of personal data from their users. 
Perhaps because most users don't know the details of which data are being collected, they have so far shown a surprisingly high tolerance for online surveillance. Sadly, most users never bother to read, say, Facebook's terms of service before clicking "agree," and are indifferent to how much surveillance is being carried out.
In fact, extensive tracking has become the new normal. The question is no longer whether Facebook should monetize users' personal data, but whether it should be required to pay users for their data or even charge users a fee to opt out of data collection.
But could the data that Facebook or Google accumulates ever really be safe? No matter how much one spends on protecting large databases, it is farfetched to believe that nobody inside or outside such a massive and complex organization could breach it. America's own National Security Agency could not prevent Edward Snowden, a low-level contractor, from walking off with a trove of state secrets on a thumb drive. And then there is the whole Facebook scandal involving the nearly 90 million users' data harvest by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.