If the economic vocabulary is overflowing with anglicisms, some acronyms that one would think came straight from the United States are in fact pure local creations. This is the case with the acronym Gafa, invented to put the digital giants, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon in one single bag. A lot in which we often add Microsoft thus giving the acronym Gafam.
During a conference in Paris in 2017, former US President Barack Obama was asked about the challenges posed by “ the power of Gafa “. A question he had been hard pressed to answer. Because if all these companies are the jewels of Uncle Sam’s country, the acronym is currently only used on the Old Continent.
A search on the Washington Post thus shows that the term Gafa has only come up about thirty times over the past few years, most often to speak of the “Gafa tax” implemented in France. The cross, on the other hand, has already used this acronym a good thousand times and The echoes more than 10,000.
The United States uses another acronym for the giants that thrive on the Internet: the Fangs. In this definition, Facebook and Google surround Amazon and Netflix. In recent years, the name Natu has also appeared, this time bringing together groups that have in common the fact that they have revolutionized their market: Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla and Uber.
If American companies hold the top of the numeric keypad, however, they are not the only ones to display their power there. China, in particular, is resisting with its own champions. And therefore its own acronym: BATX, for the quartet composed of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi.
.
