A Data Moguls’ Monopoly

Writer: Frank Nankivell

Images: Grace Crossley

Information is power. A phrase so well known that everyone from Kofi Annan to Mary J Blige has been recorded saying it. Why though do we let the control, management and use of our information get into the hands of data monoliths? The seeding of power into the hands of private businesses is now cascading at an ever alarming rate. With an increasingly limited arsenal available to challenge these mammoth businesses, society is becoming manipulated for technologists’ financial gain.

The collection and analysis of data is a key part of the modern life. All of us constantly use services that need our information to operate. Every sector from healthcare, food or travel all require us to input and digest information. However, the collection and analysis of a huge majority of this is undertaken by a small number of key technology players such as Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb.

With these organisations now so established, new businesses have even stopped competing in their markets. In their 2018 report, the Startup Genome Project described 2018’s least successful organisation types as companies that ‘fuelled the new wave of the internet’: social media apps, digital media, and other pure internet companies. “While [established technology] companies have built the current infrastructure that the new generation of startups use — think Facebook and Google…Startup formation in these sub-sectors is not growing as it used to, and in some cases, it is declining”, states the report.

This is in direct contrast to the amount of information individuals are creating which and is then being collected. Everyday: 5 billion YouTube videos are watched, 95 million Instagram posts are made and 3.5 billion google searches are made. This means today that most data is collected via a group of companies which have a growing stranglehold on the market.

“In any other industry if you, a single party, has over 60 or 70 percent of the market share, the regulatory body comes in and tries to see if there is an unfair advantage. In the online sphere, or the data collection sphere, about 70 percent of the data collected online is through Google or Facebook advertisements. And over 80% of the search data that people do is with Google. It’s with one company alone” , explains Rohallah Ghasemi from Startup Funding Club.

Are government regulators just having a lazy few years? Not exactly. All the big technology giants have been recorded lobbying governments for concessions and the removal of legislation. These are laws which are intended to be put in to stop them misusing our information.

The most recent example comes via an investigation from the Observer and Computer Weekly which exposed the amount of sway Facebook had over legislators. The claims included Facebook lobbying the Irish government for the prevention of ‘over restrictive’ data privacy laws, GDPR, and threatening to withhold investment from countries unless they supported or passed Facebook-friendly laws. The Observer argued that the documents showed an “operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.”

This means that technology giants are increasing their owners wealth at an incredible rate. When you are influencing the law in your favour most things start turning up rosy. The analysis of the global populations data has enabled the founders of companies like Google to have a net worth of each 47 billion dollars (that's 94 billion combined). This is the same amount as the bottom 800 million people on this planet. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, trumps that with a wealth of 112 billion dollars, the same amount as the bottom 1.05 billion people.

So what next? If information truly is power we need to start to reflect on what giving our information to these technology mammoths may mean. These organisations appear to be driven solely for their founders own gain, and if we allow organisations like these to rewrite our laws then they may start to exert a pressure we cannot resist.