in politics, in the US, in Europe and elsewhere.

Looking at the US historically, the rich

have always exerted power top down.

They could buy the media, as Rupert Murdoch has.

You could buy politicians and purchase influence in that way.

But these days with the tech titans of Silicon Valley

there's a new way of exerting power.

And that's the bottom up way that

is part and parcel of their business model of surveillance

capitalism.

The business model of micro-targeted advertising,

and the way in which tech firms follow us around the internet,

and increasingly offline via GPS and our handsets,

and use that to build a sort of a voodoo doll profile of us,

which can then be sold to advertisers and the highest

bidders, companies and public entities,

that is really a different kind of power.

It allows tech firms to divide and conquer us in new ways.

And in some ways that's really what

worries people about money in politics now.

It's not so much that Mark Zuckerberg

is having secret meetings with Donald Trump.

It's that Facebook itself can target us,

as consumers or even as citizens,

at a very individual level.

That's something that's quite different.

And that's also something that antitrust policy is not

really equipped to address.

I used to think it was radical, the idea

of possibly banning micro-targeting or limiting

surveillance capitalism.

But I'm beginning to think that it

may be one of the most important levers

that we have in controlling monopoly

power and the partisan politics that we have today.