The 2010s will be remembered for a new era in the development of capitalism, one of mind-boggling scale. Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are closing the decade as the world’s first trillion-dollar companies. Last year, Apple’s revenue was larger than Vietnam’s GDP, while Amazon’s research and development spending alone is almost as much as Iceland’s GDP. Facebook boasts 2.4 billion users, a population larger than that of every continent except Asia.
Big tech may offer much to us as consumers but, as the decade progressed, it became clear that it presents a problem for us as citizens who want elections that adhere to advertising laws and are free from foreign interference. It’s also a problem for people who want to live in towns with functioning retail high streets, and where logistics and delivery are secure, proper jobs, not rendered precarious by Amazon’s ruthless margin-squeezing. And it’s a problem for us as democrats who depend on independent news media to hold our elected representatives to account.
Companies this size are even bad for capitalism itself. They dominate markets and quash competition: Google and Facebook control an estimated 60% of all online advertising, and, in the US, Amazon gets four in every 10 dollars spent online. Should another tech company show promise, one of these firms just gobbles it up.
The decade gave us new concepts to account for all this: the political economist Nick Srnicek talks of “platform capitalism”, a business model of creating market trading platforms, extracting vast amounts of data and seeking monopoly. Prof Shoshana Zuboff dubbed this “surveillance capitalism”, warning of the risks that data poses to democracy and freedom.
Let’s look back at the headlines in 2010. Facebook was under attack for exposing information that users assumed was private; Google exited China after cyberattacks aimed at human rights activists; Apple had a huge US iPad data breach; and there was an “epidemic” of worker suicides at Chinese factories run by Foxconn, which makes Apple products. Amazon meanwhile was found to be selling a paedophile advice guide – and was locked in argument with publishers over ebook royalties.
Researchers at the time warned that something was rotten in the state of California, too. “Cyberlaw” scholars Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain argued that we must grapple with who would govern cyberspace and how. Prof Siva Vaidhyanathan feared “the Googlization of everything” and Evgeny Morozov railed against “the net delusion” – the naive notion that the internet would liberate the world. During Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.” He should have been more careful what he wished for.
But if the problems were so evident so early, why didn’t governments rein the industry in?
Big tech moved at a scale and speed that states and regulators couldn’t match. As marketplaces, they benefit from “network effects”, where each additional user improves the utility of a service, producing a positive feedback loop of growth. Running costs barely change as more people join. This has allowed their rise to surpass those of other boom industries in the past, from automobiles to oil: one additional car on the roads, for instance, causes more congestion.
In the first half of the 2010s, financial crisis was spreading from the US to the eurozone and political energies were directed away from the tech industry. There was a skills gap – career politicians and their advisers lacked expertise to even identify the problems, let alone design fixes. But more than this, governments didn’t want to rein tech firms in. They were an engine of growth in an otherwise sclerotic economy. And Barack Obama thought that social media and micro-targeted digital communications had helped him win the 2012 election. (Then Trump thought much the same.) There was no political will for change.
There is finally momentum growing around regulation: in 2018, GDPR made legislative ground for user data protection and privacy, and ongoing EU antitrust rulings are chipping away at monopolistic excesses. Increasing tech employee activism provides a kind of internal regulation, too. The next decade will also see more competition from Chinese firms such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu – though this is just more platform capitalism wearing a different hat.
Are alternatives possible? I would like to be more confident than I am. This decade has seen decentralised social networks such as Mastodon, Gab, Diaspora and the dark web either sputter out or, in the absence of moderators, fill instead with Nazis and paedophiles. Every so often there’s a call for a publicly funded state social media platform – but, with Boris Johnson gunning for the BBC licence fee in the UK, this is but a pipedream.
In the US and UK, with rightwing populists in power, greater state regulation may not go exactly as tech commentators of the early 2010s hoped. There are fundamental tensions in what we are asking of Facebook, Google and Twitter. We fear how far they shape and control the information billions see – but, in seeking action on abusive content and misinformation, we ask that they exert yet more control, not less.
The social media era is already waning: we’re shifting away from public posting towards private and small group messaging. I expect to see tech companies getting better at the small design decisions that discourage hostile digital behaviour – though I hold little hope for decisive action on the big issues of antitrust or curtailing data collection. The tech headlines of 2019 – “Facebook revenues soar despite $5.1bn in fines”, “Google hit with ‘historic’ monopoly abuse investigation” – may well predict the state of things in 2029.