Hungry hi-tech giants: are Google and the gang really getting ready to take over the world?

Joel Kotkin, a professor in economic and social development and author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, has compared these companies to the Japanese keiretsu: sprawling conglomerates such as Mitsubishi and Sumitomo that dominated their country’s economy in the second half of the 20th century and whose business practices were defined, in the words of Japan-based journalist Karel van Wolferen, as a series of “intertwined hierarchies”.