Tech firms want to move from the online world to dominate the physical world too, but governments must be ready to extract a high price.
Tech firms want to move from the online world to dominate the physical world too, but governments must be ready to extract a high price
Having used most of them since they first emerged, I’m far better disposed toward the giant digital corporations, or “Big Tech”, than most people. I started working from home long before the current emergency, 38 years ago in fact; doing that without Google and Wikipedia is unthinkable to me, while entertainment would be very dull without YouTube and Spotify. The last year has made Amazon indispensable, while Facebook has become my place to joke and grumble.
This extended acquaintance means I still regard Big Tech’s services as remarkable amplifiers of my abilities, rather than sinister threats to my freedom. I do, of course, acknowledge that their monopolies, lack of care over fake news and flagrant tax avoidance are serious problems, but I believe the perpetrators need to be cured rather than crippled or exterminated. I feel increasingly out of step in this, though: more and more people I know boast of giving up one or more of these online services and claim to support drastic government action against Big Tech.
I’ve written before about how their wealth makes the digital titans serious competitors to states, but I’ve also remarked that they don’t have armies. What they do have, however, is a cosy relationship with the Democratic Party. Couple this with a tendency to be more progressive over climate change than fossil fuel corporations, and I was surprised how little action Trump took against them. Maybe it’s because Twitter and Facebook were so essential to his rise.
Trump did nevertheless initiate an antitrust lawsuit against Google. Experts agree that Biden is likely to continue with this while several states, including New York, are filing their own suits to combine with the Department of Justice’s. Biden has hinted he might revoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields internet companies from liability for their content, while congressional Democrats have published a 449-page report on the monopolistic practices of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. There’s talk of a national consumer privacy and data protection bill – like California’s Consumer Privacy Act – which would restrict tech companies’ ability to store our data and thus severely damage their business models. It’s unlikely, however, that actual breakups will be on the cards any time soon.
Many of the major players are ambitious to provide realworld as well as virtual services: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Uber are all working to penetrate healthcare, education and transport using innovative, “disruptive” services supported by their powerful infrastructures and AI capabilities. Often, they’re more efficient than state equivalents.
However, Big Tech firms remain commercial, unelected enterprises that are committed first and foremost to shareholders and, therefore, have an incentive to displace rather than create jobs. If they’re allowed to take over services from states, promising to invest in carbon-reduction technologies while simultaneously creating mass unemployment, states will be tempted to lean on their technologies to integrate welfare, security and taxation. This is already happening with India’s Aadhaar system and Alibaba helping Chinese local governments to run the social credit system. There are serious questions about how effective such systems are, but they certainly grant states a sinister degree of extra power over citizens, letting them punish dissidence by loss of benefits.
Political polarisation is weakening states throughout the West to the extent that their survival depends on delivering the goods more equitably: with the right policies, Big Tech infrastructure could be made to help rather than destroy democracy. A spectrum of measures from breakup at one extreme, through increased regulation and fairer taxation, to public-private partnerships at the other could enable governments to tame the corporations’ power without destroying them. Construct different “packages” for different economic sectors by assessing the social value of each and choose the appropriate set of measures from that spectrum. The precise composition would be negotiable, providing the leverage the state needs
The digital giants aren’t too big to be regulated. Rather than simply collecting more monetary tax from tech companies, states might instead accept some of the payment due in free public use of their services – such as heavily discounted electric vehicles for public transport, or similar non-cash alternatives.
I still regard Big Tech’s services as remarkable amplifiers of my abilities, rather than sinister threats to my freedom
A spectrum of measures could enable governments to tame the corporations’ power without destroying them