We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon

Or maybe author wants strong reaction, clickbait or dont care. There will be backslash against tech arrogance, sure, but there is no need for it to involve nationalisation.

You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously. Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is inherent merit to what they write.

I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset.

Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now:

"Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know"

"The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer"

"Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"

"Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it."

"Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did."

... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers:

"The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy"

"Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?"

"The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don’t protect us from tech giants"

I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.

Why doesn't the author mention Microsoft? Why hasn't anyone else mentioned Microsoft in the comments?

Mobile might be what people use most of the time. But for productivity, specialty applications (X-Ray software, billing, medical applications, scientific, tool software, video editing, 3d rendering, ATMs, cash registers) Windows dominates. There is a huge body of software that can not be used on mobile.

Bill Gates threatened to withdraw Windows from the market during the anti-trust trial. I assumed this would also include security patches and key registration. This would have threatened millions of businesses and government services. If you can have any argument against a tech company operating against the public interest you have to include Microsoft.

> At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure.

Why? Public infrastructure like sewer, or roads, is tightly coupled with the fact that it's close to impossible to gain physical land/space to build a second one. AWS/Azure on the other hand neither blocking you from accessing the land nor implemented any regulatory capture to prohibit you from building your own version of cloud infrastructure.

In my opinion, apart from Medicare, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Defence, Prison System and a few other should be nationalized, not Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft etc.