Top tech too big?
Silicon Valley’s biggest players now face the kind of grilling usually reserved for Wall St.
Silicon Valley’s biggest players now face the kind of grilling usually reserved for Wall Street
For more than a decade now, our love affair with three high-profile tech companies has been torrid.
Google answers our every query. Facebook keeps us connected. Amazon anticipates our shopping desires and delivers them fast.
But as the importance of these software-driven, data-collecting, money-making giants in our lives has mushroomed, so too have concerns these sprawling businesses — whose combined market cap is a whopping $1.6 trillion — have grown too big, too influential, too unmonitored. Too much Big Brother dystopians warn about.
What’s particularly striking about the growing chorus criticizing Google, Facebook and Amazon is that it comes from all corners, from consumers to Congress.
Consumers don’t trust the computer algorithms that determine what Facebook updates they see from friends. They wonder about the veracity of the search links Google delivers. And they fear Amazon, the “everything ” store, will put every brick-and-mortar retailer out of business.
Long praised as shining ex- amples of American innovation, Internet companies for years enjoyed a collective pass from consumers and lawmakers enamored with their ease and seemingly overnight ability to vault us into the future.
Antitrust laws anchored to a singular concern — fair competition for the benefit of consumers — didn’t touch disruptive companies providing goods and services that were often cheaper, if not free. But while few experts predict the breakup of big tech in the way that railroads and oil companies were dismantled, Silicon Valley’s biggest players are now facing the kind of grilling usually reserved for Wall Street hedge funds and big banks.
Facebook and Google have come under the most intense pressure from U.S. lawmakers they’ve ever faced — scrutiny that’s likely to at least prove a new cost. Consider the $2.7 billion fine recently levied against Google by European regulators, which said Google gave an unfair advantage to its own shopping service in its search results. Google has denied any wrongdoing.
This new pressure could possibly hamper growth. Facebook, in response to congressional investigators looking at the sale of $100,000 in Russian ads on its platform during the U.S. election campaign, has promised a change to how it sells political ads.
While Amazon’s rampant business deals rarely caused a stir in
the past, its recent $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods was flagged for its monopolistic implications by some Democrats.
“We should really be concerned about the influence these companies have on the ways we structure our thoughts and our lives,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). “Our everyday interaction with Google and Facebook seems to imply no danger or annoyance. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to worry about.”
While Trump administration officials have not displayed an eagerness to curtail Facebook, Google and Amazon, those vying for the White House next may sing a more modern antitrust tune.
“Americans don’t like bigness, whether it’s big businesses or big government,” says Margaret O’Mara, a University of Washington history professor who focuses on the high-tech economy. “You can always win an election by getting up on a podium and railing against bigness.”
“We should really be concerned about the influence these companies have on the ways we structure our thoughts and our lives.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry).