Shadowing Practice: Nishad Sanzagiri | Technology Empires Debate | Proposition (1/6) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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We will now move to the motion before the House tonight,
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which is, this House believes that tech empires threaten society.
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I now look to the first speaker, the Director of Press, Nishad Sansegiri, St. Anthony's College, to open the case for the proposition.
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Thank you, Madam President.
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I'm humbled to be standing before you in this August chamber and honored to open the case for the proposition
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on such an important and topical issue.
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In the past couple of decades, the proliferation of Internet technologies has drastically altered every facet of life.
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It has completely transformed how we communicate with each other, what we purchase and buy, and how we gather information.
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This has been brought about by a few companies who embraced the early potential of readily available internet
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and converted it into helpful insight and, well, lots of wealth.
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No one on this side of the motion is aiming to claim that these companies, companies like Google, like Amazon,
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Facebook, Microsoft, are inherently and completely evil.
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But the fact is that as the years have gone by, these companies have become large, and so has their influence and power.
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As the early Internet pioneer and MIT researcher Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote, it's obvious now that what we did was a fiasco.
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So let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for us to call the world's tech empires to account.
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In the span of just a decade, firms such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon have risen to be the biggest companies on the planet
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and have amassed a wealth of power that threatens us all.
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They distort our democratic processes, they stockpile our data, and exercise undue sway over our markets.
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It's no surprise that we are then in the midst of a backlash, or to use the more fashionable term, tech-lash, against these technology giants.
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Today, I have three main arguments in support of the motion that I would like to explore for you.
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First, that these tech empires are ludicrously big and growing exponentially.
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Second, that they are anti-competitive and have created an oligopoly.
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And finally, that they are damaging to a democracy.
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I hope that you will take these points to heart
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when you walk down that historic door at the end of this debate and cast your vote.
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But before I go ahead and convince you that the rise of these tech empires threatens our society,
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it falls on me to introduce the opposition speakers for tonight's debate.
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Speaking first is Cecilia Zao, a first-year geographer at St. Catharines College.
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Now, I hear that Cecilia is a boxer, and although I do know that this was the very chamber that Town vs. Gown took place last week,
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I do hope that if she loses this motion tonight, she won't try to settle the score in that other way.
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Our second speaker is Matt Warman, MP, who was the former technology editor of The Telegraph
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and currently serves as a conservative party politician and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on broadband and digital communication.
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I hope that he will join us in agreeing with the leader of his own party, who mentioned last week at Davos
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that tech companies need to seriously tackle how their technology can be used by those who wish to do us harm.
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And finally, closing the motion for the opposition is Catherine Parsons, co-founder and co-CEO of Decoded, a startup which runs courses in programming.
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Now, given that Ms. Parsons has already been in the news for imposing a company-wide email ban, stating that replying to emails took too much time out of a day,
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I'm happy to report that when the union got in touch with her with the invitation to speak at this debate, she did respond to us rather promptly.
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Jokes aside, I look forward to what I know will be a rigorous and challenging debate.
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Madam President, these are your guests, and they're most welcome.
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The fact that with a combined market value of $3 trillion, four of the five most valuable publicly traded firms in the world,
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our technology companies ought to give us cause for concern.
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In the final quarter of 2017, the five biggest technology firms, or the frightful five as the New York Times likes to call them,
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which includes Google's parent Alphabet and companies like Amazon,
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Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, have had their combined quarterly revenues at 143 billion US dollars, which is greater than the GDP of most countries.
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I mean, just take the data compiled by NGO Global Justice Now,
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which highlights that Apple's revenues in 2015 were greater than those of countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
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And these massive revenues are then turned into huge profits.
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In fact, all the statistics associated with these tech companies are humongous.
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Well, except for the tax records.
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Now, these tech firms invest hardly anything in the actual creation of content, which is usually always user-generated, which helps their ludicrous profit margins.
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Today, Google's profit margin is nearly twice as much as that of CBS, a traditional content creator.
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Even Goldman Sachs has found itself in the rather awkward position
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of being baffled by the astonishing profit margins these monopolies have reaped in recent years.
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A 2016 Goldman Sachs report says, and I quote, we are always very for guiding for mean reversion,
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but if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years, particularly when global demand growth is below trend,
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there are wider questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism.
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Ladies and gentlemen, you know there's something seriously threatening about the rise these tech firms
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when they scare Goldman Sachs against the idea of capitalism.
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And then the stockpile of digital data that these empires hold is obvious.
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I mean, Facebook not only owns the largest pool of personal data in the world, but it also has access to a social graph
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that shows it how all of its two billion monthly active users are connected to each other.
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Every time any of us consents to Facebook's data terms and conditions, we we give them permission to control our profile.
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It becomes their property.
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Every time, and the same data is either sold off in bulk to companies who are happy to pay for it,
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or used to undercut rivals and strengthen the hold of these rising empires.
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And this brings me to my second point, which is that these companies partake in anti-competitive behavior.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Google has an 88% market share in online searches and search advertising,
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while its Android mobile operating system enjoys an 80% global market share within its category.
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In some sense, not since the era of Rockefeller Standard Oil has a company dominated a market to the extent
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that Google does.
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And that's not all.
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Facebook has a 77% market share in mobile social media, and Amazon controls 74% of e-book sales, and will soon become the biggest clothing retailer in the United States.
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This has created what The Economist calls the winner-takes-all economy of the technology age.
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compared to any other industry in the world.
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Well, I'll get to that in the rest of my speech.
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And that's the next point.
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So both Google and Facebook, for example, use their dominance in the market to squeeze monopoly ransoms from advertisers, which are always usually higher than market price.
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Similarly, following Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, it has become both a retailer and a marketplace.
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This highlights how a firm as big as Amazon can overshadow brick-and-mortar retail competition through extremely competitive prices,
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only to then acquire the physical presence of its rivals as soon as the competitor's business becomes unwiable.
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In similar vein, all these tech employers have used insights from the data they have amassed to uncover emerging rivals
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and buy them off.
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For example, Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016.
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And when Snapchat rejected Facebook's offer in 2013, well, the rest is history.
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I'm sure each one of us here knows about Instagram's story feature, which had cloned off Snapchat, leading the latter's share prices to drop significantly.
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Point of information.
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I think you're right in saying that there's an absence of external competition in the markets, but a lot of the competition often occurs in terms of especially
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because of the career risk institutes of the certain developers that individuals often get by, by showing up a bit of crotch against their fellow colleagues and public departments with a very same competition.
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So would you say market does apply to an entire competition and an entire value of metrics with these companies?
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We'll talk about that.
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Cool.
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Ladies and gentlemen, in Silicon Valley today, in the home of the entrepreneur,
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the number of startups is lower than it has been at any point since the 1970s.
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And for most of the entrepreneurs that do exist, the zenith of their success is to one day be bought off by one of these giants.
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I can imagine that our honorable opposition would like you to believe that these first are good for the consumers.
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Let's say that many online services would be worse off if their providers were smaller, and in total, the prices of goods has come down.
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But the issue is that this raises question of fair competition, because these firms often benefit from legal exemptions.
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Unlike mainstream publishers, Facebook and Google are hardly accountable for what users say on them.
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It is no surprise then that Trump, for example, was able to and still is able to get his message across on Facebook
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and Twitter in a way
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that is enormously influential without undertaking the kind of obvious quality checks that we would associate with reaching the mass public.
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And it's not like these tech empires just compete in the market.
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From all the statistics that we have seen, they are the market.
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And this brings me to my final point of the night.
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There's no doubt that technology and the web has become crucial to all of our lives and also to the global economy.
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And yet, the decisions on how these technology companies do what they do have never been voted upon by anyone.
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Those judgments were made by executives at Facebook, at Google and at Amazon, and imposed upon a society without any regulatory scrutiny.
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Today, instead of solving the world's problems, as I'm sure our honorable opposition would claim they do, these tech empires have ended up fashioning greater complications.
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Let's take the example of the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S presidential elections.
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Facebook disclosed late last year that it had discovered $100,000 worth of ads
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by several hundred inauthentic accounts that appeared to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign.
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But today, under increasing pressure, these tech firms are intensifying their public relations offensive in order to safeguard their reputation
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and by extension the pockets of their shareholders.
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However, for all the empty talk that Silicon Valley has partaken in, its fundamental attention has always been on whatever it could monetize.
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For example, when Pulitzer Prize winning online news source ProPublica attempted last September to buy targeted ads for Jew haters on Facebook,
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the tech giant did not self-reflect on whether this was an immoral idea.
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It approved the ads within 15 minutes and asked the purchasers on how they would like to pay.
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To conclude, in this day and age, Facebook defines how our society converses, Amazon decides what we purchase,
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and Google regulates how we obtain information.
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These are the companies
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that have the power to allocate the verdict on who gets a digital bullhorn and who is silenced from the interweb.
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Nothing posits their power and the obscure rationales behind their community guidelines more than the fact
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that these firms suspend accounts and handles for posting topless photos
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and yet deem it unproblematic when the Twitter-in-chief of the free world threatens nuclear war in less than 280 characters.
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Ladies and gentlemen, tonight when you're walking out of that historic door, you'll be making a choice.
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A choice about what kind of a society you want to live in.
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One, where a few tech empires rule the many for their own profit, where technologists come for your money and against your democracy just as they have come for your personal data,
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or a society based on healthy competition and free and fair dissemination of information.
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It is for this reason, ladies and gentlemen, that I urge you to vote for the proposition and walk out of the door on the right.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 132 sentences and 2132 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:56. The speaker talks at a natural 153 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| gentleman noun | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.təl.mən/ | Any well-bred, well-mannered, or charming man. |
| threaten verb | /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/ | To make a threat against someone; to use threats. |
| margin noun | /ˈmɑɹ.d͡ʒɪn/ | The edge of the paper, typically left blank when printing but sometimes used for annotations etc. |
| acquisition noun | /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/ | The act or process of acquiring. |
| rival noun | /ˈɹaɪvəl/ | A competitor (person, team, company, etc.) with the same goal as another, or striving to attain the same thing. Defeating a rival may be a primary or necessary… |
| proposition noun | /ˌpɹɑpəˈzɪʃən/ | The act of offering (an idea) for consideration. |
| chamber noun | /ˈt͡ʃeɪ̯mbɚ/ | The private room of an individual, especially of someone wealthy or noble. |
| highlight verb | /ˈhaɪˌlaɪt/ | To make prominent; emphasize. |
| insight noun | /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t/ | A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently used with into. |
| entrepreneur noun | /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/ | A person who sets up a business; generally, a person who owns and manages a business and assumes its financial risks. |
| capitalism noun | /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/ | A socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit. |
| honorable adjective | /ˈɑn.ə.ɹəbl̩/ | Behaving in a manner that shows honor; decent, having integrity. |
| retailer noun | /ˈɹiteɪlɚ/ | A retail sales company or salesman. |
| pocket noun | /ˈpɑ.kɪt/ | A bag stitched to an item of clothing, used for carrying small items. |
| clothing noun | /ˈkloʊðɪŋ/ | Any of a wide variety of articles, usually made of fabrics, animal hair, animal skin, or some combination thereof, used to cover the human body for warmth, to… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| buy off verb | To pay off, convince to refrain etc. by corrupt payment or other service. | |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| go ahead verb | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | To proceed with; to begin. |
| look forward to verb | To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to. | |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. | |
| walk down verb | To continually advance (on an opponent) and punch (the opponent) in order to control the fight and dominate the opponent, while shrugging off the opponent's… |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 11 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, you're, I'll. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, clothing /ˈkloʊðɪŋ/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, strengthen /ˈstɹɛŋ(k)θən/, inauthentic /ˌɪnɔˈθɛn.tɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, proposition /ˌpɹɑpəˈzɪʃən/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, extension /ɪkˈstɛnʃən/, associate /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/
- Long words — get the stress right: acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, proposition /ˌpɹɑpəˈzɪʃən/, entrepreneur /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/, capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like gentleman, threaten, margin.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been brought · have gone · has come |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | has been brought · are then turned · being baffled |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who wish · dollars, which is · content, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.