It is hard to find anyone cheering for a world dominated by a few giants. It is even harder to find anyone who thinks that Big Tech stands any chance of being toppled. Both the right and the left clamour for a break-up of the biggest web platforms, notably in America—from the trustbusting manifesto pledge by Elizabeth Warren, a democratic senator, to the followers of Alex Jones, a right-wing commentator, who was recently banned from several social-media sites.
Monopoly break-ups are the disused weapons of antitrust. Like stone pyramids, they seem a relic of history, a lost art from a fallen civilisation. Yet they are exceptionally hard to do politically. So if break-ups belong to the past, how can society tame Big Tech? The question has fresh salience as America’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission divvy up which agency will handle possible antitrust investigations of companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor.
As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system. (...)
Creating state-like duties for the big tech platforms imposes short-term pain on their shareholders in exchange for long-term gain. Shaving a few hundred million dollars off a company's quarterly earnings to pay for compliance is a bargain in exchange for a world in which they need not fear a rival growing large enough to compete with them. Google can stop looking over its shoulder for the next company that will do to it what it did to Yahoo, and Facebook can stop watching for someone ready to cast it in the role of MySpace, in the next social media upheaval.
These duties can only be performed by the biggest companies, which all-but forecloses on the possibility of breaking up Big Tech. Once it has been knighted to serve as an arm of the state, Big Tech cannot be cut down to size if it is to perform those duties.
Over the past 12 months there has been a radical shift in the balance of power on the internet. In the name of taming the platforms, regulators have inadvertently issued them a “Perpetual Internet Domination Licence”, albeit one that requires that they take advice from an aristocracy of elite regulators. With only the biggest tech companies able to perform the regulatory roles they have been assigned because of complexity and cost, they officially become too big to fail, and can only be nudged a little in one direction or another by regulators drawn from their own ranks.
Monopoly break-ups are the disused weapons of antitrust. Like stone pyramids, they seem a relic of history, a lost art from a fallen civilisation. Yet they are exceptionally hard to do politically. So if break-ups belong to the past, how can society tame Big Tech? The question has fresh salience as America’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission divvy up which agency will handle possible antitrust investigations of companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor.As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system. (...)
Creating state-like duties for the big tech platforms imposes short-term pain on their shareholders in exchange for long-term gain. Shaving a few hundred million dollars off a company's quarterly earnings to pay for compliance is a bargain in exchange for a world in which they need not fear a rival growing large enough to compete with them. Google can stop looking over its shoulder for the next company that will do to it what it did to Yahoo, and Facebook can stop watching for someone ready to cast it in the role of MySpace, in the next social media upheaval.
These duties can only be performed by the biggest companies, which all-but forecloses on the possibility of breaking up Big Tech. Once it has been knighted to serve as an arm of the state, Big Tech cannot be cut down to size if it is to perform those duties.
Over the past 12 months there has been a radical shift in the balance of power on the internet. In the name of taming the platforms, regulators have inadvertently issued them a “Perpetual Internet Domination Licence”, albeit one that requires that they take advice from an aristocracy of elite regulators. With only the biggest tech companies able to perform the regulatory roles they have been assigned because of complexity and cost, they officially become too big to fail, and can only be nudged a little in one direction or another by regulators drawn from their own ranks.
by Cory Doctorow, The Economist | Read more:
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