Threats to Big Tech
Threats to Big Tech
2020 was another glorious year for Big Tech as lockdowns and a stay-at-home culture gave an explosive boost to demands for its products and services. But perhaps it was the apogee of their decades-long rise from obscurity to emergence as the world’s most powerful corporations.
Their new ways of doing business have allowed them extraordinary freedom to prosper. Now the political classes are turning their attentions to taming those freedoms. But how? Should regulators deploy their creaky old laws such as anti-trust or evolve a comprehensive suite of new legal rules? If so, what benefits should those new rules seek to deliver? Should the priorities be more effective taxation or more acceptable services?
In Europe governments are determined to have their share of the earnings that multinationals derive from doing business in their countries but collect elsewhere, paying little or no tax. They contemplate fierce penalties to force megabusinesses to bring those profits ashore. Regulators are planning penalties as high as 10 per cent of such firms’ global annual revenue to get compliance.
A major issue is the way infotech giants use their dominance to crush competition and use their platforms to promote their in-house services.
In the US social media providers have blatantly abused their power of censorship to advance their political views, a notorious example being their suppression of news about presidential candidate’s son Hunter Biden until after polling day – arguably delivering a wafer-thin victory to Joe Biden.
Furious Republicans have, in the dying days of the Trump administration, used federal regulators and state-level attorneys-general to unleash a barrage of anti-trust cases against the companies.
The lawsuit against Google by the Federal Trade Commission is said to be based on e-mails showing that it colluded with Facebook to block on-line advertising competition to clear the way for a takeover years ago.
Threats to Big Tech taken from our ‘On Target Newsletter’ issue no 262
