TODO: They have also hollowed out other industries. Facebook and Google have hijacked the advertising revenue of newspapers, Apple has eaten up music sales, and Amazon has throttled publishers and bookshops.

The threat of these companies, however, lies not just in their size, but in the 21st century’s most valuable asset: data. Extracted freely from us, the users, data is the digital economy’s oil. And all that information is being used by the tech companies not only to sell us stuff. More worryingly they are harnessing the data to profile voters and feed them ‘fake news’, thereby influencing our politics and arguably even the outcome of the American presidential election. Silicon Valley was meant to be an equalising, democratising force. Now with so much wealth and influence over our lives being centralised by a handful of companies on the West Coast of America, the tech giants are beginning to look like a serious threat to our basic freedoms.

They must be broken up. That’s the argument that will be made at this major Intelligence Squared debate by author and Times business columnist Iain Martin.