Big tech has made hundreds of billions during the pandemic. Could tighter regulation be the key to reining in such grotesque growth?
Big tech’s latest quarterly financial reports released in the US over the past week show what a great COVID year they’ve all had — and how little they’ve been affected by the regulatory attempts of individual governments around the world, including Australia’s own ACCC.
It’s the “Curse of Bigness” in practice: revenues have jumped hundreds of billions of dollars across the big five — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon — pushing each of their market capitalisations over a trillion (Australian) dollars. Between them, they’re close to 20% of the value of all publicly traded US companies.
It explains why they’re not much bothered by February’s shakedown from Australia’s old media under the guise of the news media bargaining code. The revenues Google’s parent company, Alphabet, banks between breakfast and lunch on any given day would pay the agreed yearly fee for the stories in Google News Showcase with enough left over to fund its lobbying of politicians and regulators in the US, Australia and around the world.
Read more about how the ‘curse of bigness’ is being tackled…
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