John Stankey, president and COO of AT&T, a mega-corporation forged from multiple big acquisitions, is worried about tech companies’ power. In an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Influencers with Andy Serwer, Stankey said he’s “really concerned about the concentration of economic power” in big tech companies and how they approach their “platforms’ influence on society.”
Stankey’s concern about concentrated economic power is particularly funny given that AT&T now owns Time Warner, which controls HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros. It already operated DirecTV. It, too, has a lot of concentrated economic power.
Stankey also took the interview as an opportunity to jab Facebook. He called on the social networking company to exercise “editorial integrity” or make sure news on the platform is legitimate and not fake. “If that’s where people are consuming facts and information ... then you probably need to think about what the editorial integrity of your platform is,” he said.