Dear Quartz readers,
Big Tech isn’t just big—it is inescapable in modern life. The world’s five most valuable public companies are US technology groups—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook. Collectively, they touch almost every aspect of our digital activity.
Are they too big? Maybe. Should we be worried? Probably.
For some years, conventional wisdom has held that so long as prices are going down for consumers, it shouldn’t matter how much power companies like Amazon and Google wield or how brutally they annihilate the competition. But that view is shifting in favor of a broader interpretation of Big Tech’s influence.
In this week’s field guide, Taming Big Tech, Quartz reporter Alison Griswold examines efforts to check Big Tech’s power. The question, says Alison, is no longer whether something needs to be done, but what, how soon, and whether it will be enough. Other stories in the guide address whether monopolies are inevitable in the digital era and why breaking up Big Tech might not be the best solution.
A few things that stood out for me in the Taming Big Tech field guide:
- Amazon controls roughly half of US e-commerce and 5% of all US retail sales. It also holds nearly half of global cloud services through AWS, and is carving out a sizable chunk of search.
- Facebook counts 2.2 billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. That’s 29% of the entire global population.
- Since 2017, the European Commission has fined Google €8.3 billion ($9.1 billion) on competition grounds.
- In the US, 50 state attorneys general are investigating Google and 47 are investigating Facebook.
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Cheers,
Xana Antunes
Executive editor, Quartz