The billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros has used his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos to declare that Facebook and Google’s “days are numbered”.

After touching on the threat of nuclear war; the issues around climate change; and the Trump administration, which he described as “a danger to the world”, Soros spent the bulk of his speech talking about what he described as: “another global problem: the rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant IT platform companies”.

These companies, Soros said, have often played an innovative and liberating role. “But as Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.”

He said the growth Facebook has enjoyed is unsustainable, noting that it took the company eight and a half years to reach a billion users and half that time to reach the second billion. “At this rate, Facebook will run out of people to convert in less than three years” Soros said.

Commenting on the amount of money they earn, he said: “The exceptional profitability of these companies is largely a function of their avoiding responsibility for – and avoiding paying for – the content on their platforms. They claim they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access.

Soros also questioned the role these companies play in modern life, saying: “Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age. Not just distraction or addiction; social media companies are inducing people to give up their autonomy. The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind.’ There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential elections.”

Finally, Soros said it’s only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US IT monopolies is broken, saying that they have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That, he said, turns them into a menace, and that it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them. “Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered,” said Soros. “Regulation and taxation will be their undoing and EU Competition Commissioner Vestager will be their nemesis.

“Commissioner Vestager is the champion of the European approach. It took the EU seven years to build a case against Google, but as a result of her success the process has been greatly accelerated.”