Our current attempts to tame the tech giants are destined to fail. Instead of trying to recover the old analog world, we should be asking ourselves what sort of digital world we want to live in. Only once we have that vision for the future will we know what to do in the present, writes Martin Moore.

Governments around the world are desperate to tame Big Tech. In the US, a freshly empowered Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and State prosecutors across the country have launched antitrust actions against Facebook and Google, with investigations ongoing into Amazon and Apple. In China, the ruling Communist Party has halted public offerings, forced restructurings, launched antitrust action, and threatened onerous regulation of its home-grown tech platforms, wiping billions off their value. In Europe the EU, which has a long track record of fining and regulating US tech giants, is in the process of passing the most extensive regulation to date, with a Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. And, here in the UK the government has put forward a draft Online Safety Bill which, if it goes through, will oblige tech platforms to take on a ‘duty of care’ to their users.

One can understand and empathise with government desperation to do something about the power of these transnational behemoths. Even before the pandemic struck, lawmakers were alarmed by the scale and reach of these companies. These ‘companies have too much power’, US Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in 2019, ‘over our economy, our society, and our democracy’ (link). ‘“We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people’ Damian Collins MP said. Since COVID-19 struck we have become yet more reliant on the services of these organisations. In July it was reported that the combined value of the so-called GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) was worth more than a third of the entire S&P500 index of US companies. The companies themselves seem almost embarrassed by their riches, going out of their way emphasise the contributions they are making to society and their efforts to collaborate with governments and civil society.

Attempts by governments to tame Big Tech are misguided because they aspire to recover an old analog world, a world that seems so much simpler than the global digitally interconnected one we live in now.

Yet, these desperate attempts by governments to tame and constrain Big Tech are – for the most part – misguided and potentially dangerous. They are misguided because they aspire to recover an old analog world, a world that seems so much simpler than the global digitally interconnected one we live in now. A world where appliances could not talk back, where networking happened in real life, and where we survived on fewer than half a dozen TV channels. How else can one explain attempts to charge tech platforms for every hyperlink posted on their services (as the Australian government recently tried to do), or to re-classify platforms as ‘publishers’ – similar to newspapers or book publishers – so as to make them liable for anything that is published via their services? As though simply slapping an analog label on these vast, multi-dimensional technology companies will instantly quell the torrent of disinformation, abuse and conspiracy theories that slosh about our digital oceans.