April 1, 2022
To borrow from Ben Franklin, nothing is certain except death, taxes, and that Big Tech is alarmingly…big. As Americans increasingly rely on the major tech companies to help us perform our jobs and navigate our personal lives, our trust and opinion of the digital giants continue to trend downward. Recent surveys show a mere 34 percent of the public rates Big Tech favorably.
The reasons aren’t hard to fathom, given the enormous control a few handful of corporations have over our lives. We are beholden to algorithms we don’t understand, mystified as to who has access to our personal and financial information, and lack any faith in their promises to protect our online privacy. And this says nothing of their power to control the news, influence public opinion in their preferred direction, or put their tentacles on the scale in our elections.
Often overlooked in this discussion is the myriad of troublesome ways Big Tech wields power over small businesses that bear the burden of market concentration. For years, entrepreneurs and small business owners seeking access to market places dominated by Big Tech have been forced to strike a devil’s bargain. By maintaining a tight grip on the channels of online commerce and advertising, Big Tech companies use their clout to gain an overwhelming advantage over competitors while exploiting vendors and further leveraging power in a way that simply would not have been permissible in the pre-digital, brick-and-mortar economy. Fortunately, Washington is now taking action against their monopolistic fiefdoms.
New legislation proposed in the U.S. Senate titled the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992) will prohibit tech platforms such as Amazon and Google from rigging online commerce in their favor, and holding their smaller competitors hostage. This is not legislation aimed at punishing companies for being successful, but to hold them accountable for anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices which would be considered major violations of antitrust in any other context.
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