A simple way we can curb the tech industry’s power
Few companies reach fame and fortune, and fewer reach it in years instead of decades. In Silicon Valley, all that plus world domination is commonplace. Of the five largest companies today, Google/Alphabet and Facebook together pocket half of worldwide digital advertising revenue, Amazon has just absorbed Whole Foods, and Microsoft’s empire steadily grows.
Their founders are modern-day robber barons — they oversee the biggest monopolies since the Gilded Age, and sit atop enormous fortunes to reward their favorite politicians. Their philanthropy has a technological twist: Instead of parks, museums and universities, they give the masses digital email, music, videos, friendships and more. We think we don’t pay a dime for this. The truth is, we pay much, much more.
The secret is simple: We pay with free labor. We happily fill out online form after online form for these tech companies, detailing our browsing histories, bookshelves, friends lists, likes and more. Alone, these fragments mean nothing. Together, they’re the stories of our lives: habits, aspirations, insecurities — and things we might want to buy. Advertisers call the tech companies’ front desks and receive the statistically most receptive audience on a silver platter.
It’s certainly profitable, but today’s monopolized Internet is still surprising. A company in Silicon Valley faces an extra roadblock to monopoly, one unseen in other industries. Normally, consumers buy things from companies that process a resource; a century ago, every household’s lamps burned kerosene from Standard Oil. But tech companies turn the supply pipeline on its head; today, every household’s computers blast data to a handful of Big Data companies. This reversal has a catch: We’re not the consumers, we’re the resource. So, while oil fields don’t choose which company drains them, we users do.
But only in theory. Big Data companies work around this inconvenient fact with a practice called vendor lock-in. For example, if you want to like, share or comment on something from Facebook, you have to join Facebook. Tech companies love vendor lock-in — joining your friends is easy, but leaving them puts you in a prisoner’s dilemma of friendship. It didn’t matter how new and shiny Google Plus was, or how well it suited you. You didn’t leave Facebook for it because your friends didn’t, and your friends didn’t because you didn’t.
The European Union is just the latest to realize the consequences of this, as it levied a record fine against Google this year under what the EU calls competition law. But it’s an awkward solution at best. Competition law deals with the abuse of market power against consumers, that is, advertisers. We users have no voice.
The game is rigged, and we’re losing.
We can’t even quit playing, because Big Data’s services are all but required to function in daily life. The only long-term solution is to treat them as exactly that: infrastructure. Historically, the government has done this by supporting a monopoly but closely regulating it. Today, we need the government to step in but not with monopoly. Silicon Valley already has a solution to its own problem; all we need is for the government to use it.
If you want to reach someone who uses Gmail, sure, you can use Gmail — or, you can use Yahoo, Outlook or even run your own email server in your garage. And switching providers is easy: just download your data from one provider and upload it to another. Email is an example of a federated system, that is, when one entity operates a service that can communicate with a copy of that same service operated by another entity.
Federation decouples a service from whoever provides it. Instead, many providers act like interconnected hubs, cooperating to provide the same service, but still competing to do it better than the rest. The result is zero cost to changing providers, neutralizing the prisoner’s dilemma, and with it, the tech industry’s strongest monopolization strategy.
We have never had “Ford only” freeways or “Verizon only” phones. Why should we accept “Facebook only” instant messaging or “Skype only” video chat? It takes only a little federation to make a big impact. A law requiring a few key services, such as social news feeds and instant messaging, to be federated, for example, would help us avert Big Data’s biggest dangers.
Until this happens, Big Data will only get bigger. In June, Twitter became an official communication platform of the federal government. Today, Facebook and Google clumsily assume the mantle of unelected global arbiters of content. In 30 years, Tesla might be the one that decides where self-driving cars can or can’t go. The risks of such immense power cannot go ignored. Though we are the ones who gave them their power, we have at least one way to take it back. Andrew Wang, a student in computer science and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has had a lifelong interest in computing.