Big Tech is a bit…Too Big.
Free markets thrive on competition. Any fundamentally capitalist society is founded on the backs of competitive market behavior that sees small and large firms equally compete between consumer demand, profits, market share and ultimately power. By its very definition, this is not a new phenomenon but the very nature of it has revolutionized since the advent of the internet. Growth has taken on a new meaning, as can be seen in market behaviors displayed by internet giants FAANG (or should we say MAANG now?) and the aggressive way in which they’re pursuing profits.
The latest expose came less than a month ago, when Frances Haugen — a former Facebook product manager — testified at the Senate Commerce Committee, accusing her former employers of bad practice. She asserted that Facebook had repeatedly gone out of their way to prioritize profits over the safety of young children using their subsidiary Instagram and were actively contributing to harmful internet culture.
The statistics, if you look closely, are marvelous. Together the FAANGM companies boast a combined market value of over $9 trillion and can count users somewhere in the billions, holding upwards of one-fifth of the US stock market capitalization. Alone, these numbers are incredible. However, statistics should never be viewed in isolation. In the larger picture, these numbers are deeply terrifying and are indicative of big tech’s aggressive market monopolization.
Last year, the FTC sued Facebook for illegal monopolization, alleging that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, among other things, was a flagrant violation of anti-competitive laws and displayed an abuse of their dominant position. The competition probe didn’t stop in the U.S. In early 2021, the Competition Commission of India investigated Amazon and Facebook (including the latter’s subsidiary WhatsApp) for their anti-competitive market behaviors, alleging that both entities were abusing their dominant market positions.
These legal positions are fascinating to me especially given that economies like the U.S. and India that are capitalistic in nature clearly do not like the seeds they have sown. Laws like Section 230 in the U.S., that were created to help big tech grow are now coming right back to bite the government’s (pardon my french) rear end. It’s not pleasant.
To me, the most natural response is to break up the ‘big billionaire boys club’. An alternate solution that’s floating around has also been to scrap Section 230, but that’s not nearly enough. Drawing the line between free speech and intermediary liability is an exhausting task and it’s challenging to create legislations that are consumer friendly and work to aid companies’ growth. It seems that these two requirements are slowly becoming mutually exclusive. The solution to this isn’t amending Section 230, because it requires an overhaul of the law, with no guarantee that it will protect any consumer freedoms.
The only solution to me is to dissolve big tech and ‘structurally separate’ the entities. After all, let’s not forget that the only reason Amazon and Facebook even exist today is because of the famous antitrust case against Microsoft in the 90s, wherein the underlying, novel operating system built by Microsoft (Netscape) had a 70% usage rate, threatening potential competitors in the market.
Let’s look at this simply: Amazon pays Google to appear amongst the top searches for a myriad of products, so if you’re looking to buy something, chances are you’ll end up on Amazon. Amazon also fiddles with its algorithm to ensure that their products are right on the landing page, redirecting you, a consumer, to buy only from them. Amazon, that sneaky bugger, also shares your data with Facebook. Without your consent. Facebook uses this data to suggest friends to you, people in your area, new connections, and also to run advertisements. Tomorrow you’re on Facebook and you see an advertisement for a really cool candle. You need to own it. And you need it NOW. So you — a consumer that genuinely believes in freedom of choice — hop onto Google and search for candles. And down the rabbit hole we go again.
Big tech is slowly regressing into that one cool table that we all wanted to be a part of in high school and still desperately avoided because we knew what a bad influence they were.
