Elected Officials, Please Stop Drinking Silicon Valley’s Kool-Aid
Tech giants aren’t on our side
Tech companies love to depict themselves as garage-tinkering underdogs taking on big business. They conveniently ignore the fact that many of them are some of the largest corporations in the world, let alone the United States.
There’s good reason for it. The level of scrutiny directed at large companies, especially those approaching monopoly or oligopoly, is vastly different than the attention paid to startups and small businesses. The biggest tech companies benefit immensely from the image they’ve crafted of themselves. They receive public goodwill from appearing just as humble as freelancers and small businesses everywhere — which everyone tends to support — while their size allows them to capture markets in a way smaller companies aren’t able to.
Political leaders have, at least until recently, fallen for the ruse. They let tech leaders’ actions go largely unscrutinized, buying into their promise of promoting the social good — Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan, for example — that has been pushed through well-crafted marketing campaigns. This goodwill and relative lack of scrutiny, combined with their astronomical size and dominance in their respective domains, has given them significant advantages to push an agenda that increases…
