Big Tech’s Information Monopoly and Threats to Democracy

By: Muhammad Suleman Meerani

Introduction

The Big Tech or popularly known as “Big Four” including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have revolutionized the economy and affected the daily lives of billions of people worldwide over the past decade. Amazon is the major online market place, retailer, logistics network, television and film producer, cloud-storage host, and also the owner of Washington Post media network. Apple has popularized the Smartphone and made the devices widely ubiquitous that consumers have grown accustomed to carrying a sort of supercomputer. Facebook possesses 2.4 billion people monthly active users around the world. More people use Facebook daily than follow any single world religion. Furthermore, Google operates the search engine that helps to conduct over 3.5 billion searches a day. It runs the biggest video platform online “YouTube”, the largest seller of online advertising and also licenses the world’s most popular mobile Android operating system. The Big Four generates revenue collectively larger than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of most national economies.

Scrutiny of Big Tech

Big Tech is responsible for massive wealth creation and momentous technological breakthroughs, but these tech giants have also received scrutiny related to privacy concerns, sharing and selling users’ personal information, alleged political bias, dissemination of detestable and harmful content and anticompetitive demeanor potentially. American newspaper the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that the state institutions of the United States responsible for enforcing antitrust laws including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have agreed to divide responsibility over investigation of the business practices of Big Tech. The DOJ has authority to investigate Apple and Google and FTC will investigate the Amazon and Facebook.

Benefits getting from tech giants

The assessment of humans’ reliance on tech giants may give pause to the calls of breaking the monopolies of big companies. Facebook and Google have become integrated in our daily lives as data shows average person spends 35 minutes on Facebook and searches three to four searches on Google on daily basis. Despite of governments’ uneasy relations with the power of tech companies, governments should analyze the facts that most of the users willingly sign away their rights to get a service from Facebook, Google and Amazon. Individuals agree to the terms and conditions of tech giants blindly to get a free service.

Control on personal information after breaking up Big Tech

Facebook’s global average revenue hover around $25 per user a year. So, the data of each user is actually worth $25. This amount of money helps the Facebook to fund all of the free internet services enjoyed by users from this tech giant. According to some experts, the notion that we are being robbed of our high value personal data is overstated and exaggerated. The use of users’ data may not be used always for bad purposes. The user data can be used by the Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to track the record and identify interests of any individual having tendencies towards extremist outfits. However, on the opposite side of the spectrum, the data can also be used to exploit individuals through reshaping their political tendencies and opinions. Facebook came under fire in 2017 when the Cambridge Analytica scandal emerged. Facebook sold the users’ data to advertising campaign firm Cambridge Analytica that used it for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The data theft and these high dollar amounts have caused people to ponder that their data is a huge pot of gold stolen from them by big tech.

Governments and individuals are distrusting Big Tech because of the amount of their power on data and democracy. Big tech has established monopoly because the governments have allowed them despite of having antitrust laws in developed countries like the United States. Big tech has immense power and influence in the public discourse. Even the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that it cannot prohibit people from using Facebook as it would be unconstitutional and against the freedom of speech. Facebook has become like a modern public square in the twenty first century.

Saving democracy from technology

The technology companies cause new threats each day to democracy and public values. Social media platforms and search engines spread hate speech, manipulate voters, private firms sell intrusion system with similar capacities to the intelligence agencies and advertising companies own and oversee massive information ecosystems. It is the high time for democratic principles to be safeguarded more explicitly rather than just turning to market mechanisms to bolster the democratic accountability of technology companies.

Concerns of Pakistan regarding the Big Tech

Pakistani State has been demanding the tech giants to remove the deceitful and harmful information about Islam. The video sharing platform YouTube owned by one of the Big Four Google has received several applications about the removal of Islamophobic content from the application. The government had also banned YouTube in the country due to lack of actions regarding the matters of concerns for Pakistan. Google has also failed to end the flooding of disinformation about Pakistan by the Indian networks operating from more than ninety countries around the world disclosed by European Disinfo Lab.