TOO BIG TO LOSE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 319/ 11 Feb 2021 09:15 

Having used most of them since they first emerged, I’m far better disposed toward the giant digital corporations, aka Big Tech, than most people. I started working from home long before the current emergency, 38 years ago in fact, and doing that without Google and Wikipedia is unthinkable to me, while entertainment would be very dull without YouTube and Spotify. Amazon wasn’t quite so essential before it put Maplins out of business, but the last year has made it indispensable, while Facebook has become a place to gather, joke and grumble (often about FB itself). Twitter and Instagram I find irritating and only rarely use. 

This very long acquaintance means that I still regard Big Tech’s services as remarkable amplifiers of my abilities, rather than sinister threats to my freedom. I do of course acknowledge that their monopoly power, lack of care over fake news and hate speech and flagrant tax avoidance are very, very serious problems, but I believe they need to be cured rather than crippled or exterminated. I feel increasingly out-of-step in this though: more and more people I know boast of giving up one or more of these online services (usually FaceBook or Amazon) and claim to support drastic government action against Big Tech.

I’ve written here before about how their wealth makes the digital titans serious competitors to states, but I also remarked (as Joe Stalin once sneered about the Pope) that they don’t have armies. What they do have is a cosy relationship with the Democratic Party, and they do tend to be more progressive over climate change than fossil fuel corporations, so I was surprised how little action Donald Trump took against them (maybe because Twitter and Facebook were so essential to his rise: if he escapes impeachment to run again God help them). 

He did however initiate an antitrust lawsuit against Google which experts agree Biden is likely to continue, and several states including New York are filing their own suits to combine with the DoJ’s. Biden has hinted he might revoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields internet companies from liability for their content, while Congress Democrats have published a 449-page  on the monopolistic practices of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. There’s talk of a national consumer privacy and data protection bill – like California’s Consumer Privacy Act  – which would restrict tech companies’ ability to store our data and thus severely damage their business models. It’s unlikely however that actual break-up will be on the cards any time soon. 

Many of the tech giants are ambitious to provide real-world as well as virtual services: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Uber are already working to penetrate healthcare, education and transport, using innovative, ‘disruptive’ services supported by their powerful infrastructures and AI capabilities which are often more efficient than state equivalents. They remain commercial, unelected, enterprises though, committed first of all to shareholders and whose incentive is to displace rather than create jobs. If they’re permitted to gradually take over services from shrinking states, promising to invest in carbon-reduction technologies while simultaneously creating mass unemployment, then states are tempted to lean on their technologies to integrate welfare, security and taxation, as is already happening with India’s Aadhaar system, Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ and Alibaba helping Chinese local governments to run the Social Credit system. There are serious questions about how effective such systems really are, but they certainly grant states a sinister degree of extra power over citizens, letting them punish dissidence by loss of benefits.

Political polarisation is weakening states throughout the Western world so that their very survival depends on delivering the goods more equitably: with the right policies Big Tech infrastructure could be made to help rather than destroy democracy. A spectrum of measures from outright break-up at one extreme, through increased regulation and fairer taxation, to public-private partnerships at the other (hopefully better designed than those New Labour finance-friendly initiatives that we’re still paying for) could enable governments to tame the corporations’ power without destroying them. Construct different ‘packages’ for different economic sectors – armaments, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medicine, education –  by assessing the social value of each and choosing the appropriate set of measures from that spectrum. The precise composition would be negotiable, providing the leverage the state needs. 

The digital titans aren’t too big to be regulated, though ironically enough it’s the EU that has been most effective at doing it so far. Rather than simply collect more monetary tax from tech companies (who have made an artform out of evasion via haven countries) states might instead accept some of the payment due in free public use of their services, heavily discounted electric vehicles for public transport, or similar non-cash alternatives.