Time to Rein In Big Tech

1. Time to Rein In Big Tech? In Dave Eggers’s new novel, a global internet platform (the Circle of his previous book) has acquired a massive online retailer to create the Every—a company that has perfected the business of monitoring and monetizing the behavior of its billions of users. Its campus is dubbed Everywhere; those within it control the world and its wealth. Those outside—well, they’re Nowhere, either mindlessly connected to technology or fruitlessly trying to fight it. What a perfect summation of our growing fears about Big Tech. In the past decade we’ve seen the Big Five—Facebook, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—extend their reach in amazing ways. They dominate most segments of the tech market and in 2020 collectively earned income of nearly $200 billion on revenues of more than $1 trillion. Their founders have huge fortunes; their VCs and bankers, slightly smaller ones. Early employees cashed out on valuable equity; current ones (those who work on computers, not in factories or warehouses) are paid handsomely.

2. Meanwhile, many of the people whose personal data the tech giants profit from aren’t faring as well. Lower and middle class wages have stagnated; small businesses are struggling; infrastructure, education, and health care remain underfunded; cybercrime is on the rise; and society is increasingly polarized owing to online misinformation and vitriol. From developed to emerging markets, those outside tech are capturing only a tiny fraction of the value it creates. The widening gap between digital-age haves and have-nots is the subject of much current discussion. Two terrific podcasts—Sway, featuring the tech journalist Kara Swisher, and Pivot, which she cohosts with New York University professor Scott Galloway—tackle these issues regularly and expertly. Swisher interrogates executives about their stances on privacy, hate speech, and anticompetitiveness, while Galloway, who wrote the 2017 book The Four, about Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, rants articulately about the threats they pose. This fall also brings new books that dig deeper into the challenges associated with Big Tech’s reign. Eggers’s The Every is the most fun because it’s fiction, cleverly speculating on the dystopia we’d face if these firms joined forces. The protagonist, Delaney, hates the Every for having “transformed proud and free animals—humans…into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens” while “never [seeming] sorry for any regulatory crime” or “misery-causing use of their products.” She gets a job at the firm, intending to destroy it from the inside, but unfortunately the Every has already achieved what she described in her college thesis (a ploy to get noticed by Every leaders) as “Benevolent Market Mastery”—“symbiosis between company and customer…where all desires were served efficiently and at the lowest price,” thus rendering antitrust action moot. After all, “if a company knows all and knows best, shouldn’t they be allowed to improve our lives unimpeded?” Her plan to ruin the Every involves suggesting crazy ideas (such as AuthentiFriend, which tracks your interactions with loved ones to gauge whether they love you back) that her unscrupulous colleagues unsurprisingly embrace. Though she hopes there’s some privacy-invading line that

3. users won’t allow the Every to cross, she’s wrong. And that’s not a spoiler, because we see it playing out every day in the real world. How can we curtail Big Tech? For that, let’s turn to nonfiction. Azeem Azhar, host of the HBR-affiliated podcast Exponential View and author of The Exponential Age, believes that our global economic and political systems, laws, and regulations need serious and speedy strengthening to counteract a technology ecosystem that is being invented and expanded at an ever-faster pace in ever-cheaper ways, leading to winner-take-all markets dominated by “superstar companies” that garner increasing returns on scale. Already, he worries, they could be “eroding our most cherished values.” Like Eggers, Azhar understands that consumers are willingly trading their data and cash for convenience, but he points to other big problems: the tendency of the behemoths to exploit smaller-scale producers and buy up nascent competitors, thus making the broader economy less dynamic. Plus they don’t pay nearly enough in taxes. His proposed solutions are ambitious but compelling: Empower antitrust bodies to carefully review all big company acquisitions, and if an approved one proves anticompetitive, allow for a breakup. Demand interoperability between platforms so that people aren’t tied to just one and can try new entrants. And increase international cooperation to ensure that companies do protect privacy and pay taxes. You’ll find similar themes in The Raging 2020s, by the innovation expert Alec Ross. He writes of a “power creep” that has left us ruled “more by companies than by governments” and led to “a cratering of economic prospects for hundreds of millions.” Tech giants aren’t the only culprits, but they’re some of the biggest. In his chapter on tax avoidance, for example, Ross shows how Google saves billions by funneling money through various countries. One enraging data point: World governments lose more than $500 billion each year to these legal shenanigans. Like Azhar, Ross wants to see global institutions band together to protect regular people from rich

4. corporations. “The future can still be molded to the benefit of most of us—or it can wind up serving only a select few,” he warns. “It’s up to us.” Maybe the technologists themselves will do better. That’s the hope of Stanford professors Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. In System Error they explain how the engineers building Big Tech (who become the investors funding it and the executives managing its expansion) have historically been taught to focus exclusively on optimization and efficiency. The authors would like to see a shift toward asking which problems are worth solving and which are too important to be reduced to a computational solution. “Today the focus may be on…antitrust,” they caution, “but there are…hundreds of would-be Zuckerbergs…in the pipeline to build the next world-changing…and potentially socially deleterious product.” To avoid that future, they say, we need an overhaul of tech education, a radical rethink of algorithms and privacy, and an industry commitment to values-based design, including a code of ethics and licensure. The authors are decidedly pro-regulation, too, but they see an opportunity for meaningful, willing change from within. I’m still skeptical, as are a chorus of others—not just podcasters and authors but also an increasingly vocal group of politicians and consumer and labor advocates who, in the absence of self-imposed reform, may finally move to beat down Big Tech before it becomes the Every. Source:- https://hbr.org/2021/11/time-to-rein-in-big-tech