What is Big Tech - a brief analysis of the term

As a movement that called itself No To Big Tech (after initially being called DeGoogle - but had to scrap this due to trademark/copyright issues with Google!) - it clearly is important to ask ourselves; how are we defining Big Tech?

From our research it seems that most people have come to describe the term as relating to the biggest tech firms based upon revenue. This focuses on a group of the 5 biggest tech companies, known rather imaginatively as the Big Five - Alphabet (owners of Google), Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Meta (owners of Facebook, Instagram, etc), all being US based.

In recent years we've also seen the rise in value of several hardware companies, linked to the GPU goldrush that is BitCoin and AI, with Nvidia holding a value of over $4.5 trillion (!), as well as there now being other huge hardware companies such as Broadcom, TSMC, Samsung Electronics and then Oracle (primarily producers of software). 

When consulting literature and peer reviewed papers on this topic, there have been some other proposed definitions, and most agreement seems to be related to the size of the company, in terms of revenue or value.

In Nicolas Petit's Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario the term Big Tech is a synonym for large technology companies, so in this context it is again referenced based on size. The book is described as such:

To date, world antitrust and regulatory agencies have invariably described large technology companies—such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook—  as dominant, bottleneck or gatekeeping companies comparable to the textbook monopolists of the early twentieth century. They have proceeded on this basis to discipline their business activities with unprecedented financial penalties and other regulatory obligations. This "techlash" is the subject of this book. Proceeding from the observation that big tech firms engage in both monopoly and oligopoly competition across digital markets, the book introduces a theory of moligopoly competition. It suggests that rivalry-spirited antitrust and regulatory laws are both conceptually and methodologically impervious to the competitive pressure that bears on big tech firms, resulting in a risk of well-intended but irrelevant policy intervention.   

In Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership (Kean Birch, D.T. Cochrane (external link)), they also align with the theme of size:

Our definition of Big Tech emphasizes the 'big.' Amazon, Apple, Alphabet/Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are the five largest firms in the USA by market capitalization, together comprising about 25% of the S&P500 in the United States. They dwarf even other undeniably large and powerful firms; for example, Facebook, the smallest of the five, is more than three times bigger than Exxon, Nike, and Coca-Cola, some of the most iconic American corporations. Apple is larger than the bottom 167 companies on the S&P500 combined.  

When translating the term Big Tech into Spanish, the term most commonly used in media appears to be Gigantes tecnológicos - so again, reinforcing the size of the companies in question. 

Based on the literature reviewed so far, perhaps the framing or labelling of Big Tech is in itself problematic - because you could easily argue that the size of a company (in terms of revenue, or active users), doesn't always equate with a company being good or bad. 

Is a Netflix (with approx 325 million subscribers) bad simply because of the user base/popularity of the streaming service? As it has had massive market capitalisation and global reach there likely will be some issues to be unpacked, but does it compare with fellow streaming platform Disney Plus, which might have fewer subscribers with 131 million users, but has been found to support Israel and as such is on the BDS boycott list (external link)? 

This might be an unfair comparison, and arguably as well these companies blend the entertainment and tech sector somewhat, but the point I am trying to make here is that size/value of a company might not always be related to whether they are good or not.

A deeper question would be to look instead at the financing behind such massive companies - who is funding them, and what else do they invest in? Here you will often find overlap with a lot of clearly bad industries or sectors.

I think it is still safe to say that those companies with the most wealth (and therefore power, and influence) will likely be most at risk of being harmful to the wider society. Google famously started off with the Do no evil motto internally. Can a tech company grow to a certain size without ever being co-opted in some form - often by VC backed interests?

But what we propose here is this: if we solely focus on the size of a company, which we might do from the term Big Tech - do we risk not tackling the key problem - which asks instead, how does this tech serve society? And how can we ensure it remains to do so, in the public interests of all, and not just the elite?

Whilst for many people Big Tech does literally mean size of a company - I think that generally it can also mean, tech that is harming society or our environment (which really are the same thing).

We prefer this definition, and the connection between harmful, oppressive tech, as opposed to the focus on size/revenue of the company because otherwise you risk missing the threat.

One realisation I had is that, because of the difficulty we were having in pinning down our own internal definition of Big Tech, this was probably a clue that we were asking the wrong questions.

So I propose that actually, Big Tech is a label or term that has come to be applied to publically known tech firms that are, in some shape or form, evil, or not good for wider society. 

They might profit from addiction, exploit users, push consumption, create unhappy consumers, and create this larger divide within levels of inequality due to the profits they extract (often avoiding corporation tax) that are funnelled up towards their owners and shareholders. They might even be used to help political parties win power, or to advocate for their harmful policies. 

So clearly if we instead think of the term of Big Tech as instead generally meaning bad tech - there needs to be a movement that raises awareness of why it is bad, how it is bad, but which critically also proposes how to stop the rise of Big Tech - or how to counter it.

This lead to a different kind of problem I was hitting.

Unless you are actively anti-capitalist in your critique of Big Tech - as in - within a capitalist society technology will always be abused by those with bad intentions - you end up advocating for what you might describe as less bad tech. 

There is nothing wrong with fighting for tech which is not evil by nature - and I do believe there are ways in which we can look to control the rise of Big Tech - but again, within a capitalist system, these are all very much temporary plasters being applied to a very severe, life-threatening injury.

We want to denounce Big Tech but are conscious that the ultimate question here to be asking is really, within a Capitalist society, what does good tech look like? 

I came to start the No To Big Tech movement specifically having been involved in the degrowth movement. This is a political belief or ideology (and everyone has a different idea of what degrowth is, even the proponents of the cause), whereby we recognise that in the Global North we need to reduce our level of consumption and reduce the support of harmful industries.

The degrowth movement also labels capitalism as being the main driver of this consumption mindset, as well as imperialism and colonialism as being at the heart of this. It advocates (in some groups, anyway) for delinking between the Global North and Global South, allowing for oppressed nations to liberate themselves and to become autonomous - not dependent upon oppressive western forces and their promises of aid, or help with development.

I've been part of various discussions around the Degrowth term - and how a huge issue this is, simply because it has negative connotations, and that it won't ever win support based upon the name (!) 

I quickly tired of these conversations - for me it is just a label for a movement, and that people were too busy trying to brand or market it for better Western consumption (so, projecting capitalistic values, ironically).

So for me, the name is only a label for a far bigger, wider movement and ideology. It is similar to a term like capitalism or socialism; genuinely, not many people understand these terms correctly, but they serve as labels for what are fairly complex systems or movements.

And I feel similarly about No To Big Tech - the name summarises that we are against the concept of Big Tech - that tech companies should rise to become huge monopolies, that they should have so much control and sway within society, that they can infiltrate schools, homes, be used to assist in genocides, be used to target minorities and oppressed peoples - and so on.

So for us - our movement is about organising and supporting a resistance to the rise of Big Tech, whilst also proposing ways to shackle this technology, and to advocate for tech that genuinely serves wider society, without wearing the rose-tinted glasses that technology groups seem guilty of wearing. 

We acknowledge that all of our work may still represent a temporary fix, as that whilst capitalism is the Modus Operandi of society any such movement will only be working at the fringes without getting to the root of the issue at hand.