Love lost between Big Tech and their governments, in IE Insights
IE Insights has published this article, entitled Love Lost between Big Tech and Government (pdf), about the important shift in the relationship between the world’s leading technology companies and the governments of the countries where they are based.
The shift began in the European Union, which according to the United States at the time was harassing American companies because it was unable to create its own winners, and is now being continued by the Biden administration through offensives against the power and market influence of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon; and which is now joined by China, engaged in a crusade to bring its big tech companies to heel.
There’s no doubt that technology companies have an unsuspected capacity to exercise monopolies more quickly than ever before, which requires governments to be much quicker to regulate them. The current situation, with these companies paying millions of dollars to lobby politicians of all stripes to try to avoid — or at least delay — the inevitable, makes the regulatory task difficult: on the one hand, congressmen and senators in the United States enjoy putting on a show and simmering down the leaders of the technology companies in the sessions in which they are called to testify, but on the other, legislative action and real regulation…
