Big Tech

Big Tech is in the public and political spotlight. Usually defined as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook/Meta, Big Tech is becoming the watchword for corporate surveillance, monopoly, and market power. Arguably, they are the defining institutions of our day, dominating our political economies, societies, and polities as Big Oil or Big Banks did in their time. Criticism of Big Tech is increasingly evident as well, cutting across popular books, academic work, film, and journalism: examples include, Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; recent documentaries like Social Dilemma and Agents of Chaos; and regular column inches in print media like the Financial Times and The Economist, this being particularly notable as these two are intellectual bastions of capitalism. As public, political, and policy backlash against the activities of Big Tech followed results of the 2016 US Presidential Election, the 2016 British Referendum on Europe, and the 2018 revelations about Cambridge Analytica (Zuboff, 2019), commentators have highlighted the significant loss of trust in these digital technology companies and their wares – dubbed the ‘techlash’ (Foroohar, 2019). This techlash is hardly surprising since, as Prainsack (2019) points out, Big Tech firms increasingly underpin much of our social, political, and economic worlds by providing the digital infrastructure on which we rely to live our lives. Consequently, governments and others around the world are increasingly turning their regulatory gaze onto Big Tech, leading to a surge in policy and legislative measures to curb their social and market power. Big Tech has been the subject of critical political investigations, like the recent US Congressional Hearings on Online Platforms and Market Power, or the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy. Big Tech has also been the target of specific policy action, like the European Union’s (EU) recently passed Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to address the