The big run by Big Tech is over. After people’s two-decade love affair with the tech monopolies that have come to dominate our lives, US lawmakers are finally hitting back.
The big news last week was the introduction of five bills to curb technology monopolies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
"Unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy," said David Cicilline, chair of Congress’s antitrust subcommittee.
"They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices [for] consumers and put folks out of work.
"Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure that the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us."
The five bills will make it harder for giants to buy smaller rivals — something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy to admit doing. In an e-mail in 2014, on the day it paid $19bn for its photo-sharing app, he wrote: "Instagram was our threat. … one thing about start-ups, though, is you can often acquire them."
That e-mail, among other damning ones from Amazon and the others, was included in a batch of subpoenaed correspondence that laid bare how the Big Tech firms have abused their monopoly.
US tech firms have become the richest companies in history — far outearning the great oil barons of the 1800s
After a 16-month investigation, last October US lawmakers concluded that "whether through self-preferencing, predatory pricing or exclusionary conduct, the dominant platforms have exploited their power in order to become even more dominant".
After interviewing the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, the report found they were "often evasive and nonresponsive, [which raises] fresh questions about whether they believe they are beyond the reach of democratic oversight".
That much has been obvious to any observer in the tech industry for a decade as these firms rose to become the richest companies in history — far outearning the great oil barons of the 1800s, for whom the first antitrust legislation was created.
There is a distinct sense that the war on Big Tech’s outsized control of US e-commerce, messaging, apps, and more is reaching a crescendo.
In Europe, multiple country privacy watchdogs have sued Facebook and Google over their anticompetitive behaviour, while Apple is being investigated for favouring its own apps over others in its App Store, including music streaming service Spotify, which was founded in Sweden. Apple is being sued by Fortnite games maker Epic over its insistence on taking a 30% cut of any in-app purchases on iPhones. The Australian government stared down an incompetent Facebook, which was resisting laws there, to force it and Google to pay local media houses for their content.
The tide is turning against the unfettered monopolistic practices of the companies, which have not only become the communication pipes of the internet but the worst practitioners of surveillance capitalism.
This new antitrust charge will be good for US businesses and for the rest of the world’s privacy.
- Shapshak is publisher of stuff.co.za and Scrolla.Africa, and hosts Stuff on eNCA
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.