Tech monopolies have positioned themselves so they can deeply ingrain themselves into their niches and make them seem inextricable from society

The rise of the Big Tech monopolies The companies that we now refer to as Big Tech – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta– have grown in different waves of technological development, and their businesses vary greatly in their focus. Big Tech firms deployed monopolisation strategies by: positioning themselves as intermediaries of an immense number of interactions happening online, allowing them to accumulate data like never before; prioritising fast expansion, with an obsession with growth and scale to exploit network effects to keep users locked in; creating moats around their services to ensure no competitor can challenge them; whenever a competitive threat appeared, either buying or killing it (or both) By doing this, each company gained control over specific markets, essentially becoming a gatekeeper that controls access to them and dictates the rules for a large swathe of businesses, public services and communities trapped in their strong gravitational fields. It is not hard to find the source of Big Tech’s monopoly power. We have only to look at rough markers of their control over the key functions of the Internet (Table 1). Big Tech firms control the market for search engines, mobile operating systems, cloud, digital advertising and social media. Google is a stand-out, present and dominant in so many layers of the digital economy, increasingly including the actual physical “stack” that keeps the Internet running : from the deep-sea cables (8.5% of the global cables are owned by Google15) to the data centres that host the cloud. Google also controls the most basic ways people access information online: mobile operating systems (Android) and search engines. If you are online, whether you know it or not, chances are you are using a Google service. Such global indicators of market share are mere indicators. They even disguise some alarming regional and local dynamics. For instance, one might look at Alibaba’s 24% and Amazon’s 13% slices of global ecommerce and think that it is far from being dominant. In fact, it is a standard monopolist’s trick to define the market as widely as possible, then to say “look – we are only a small part of that.' When it comes to ecommerce, due to restrictions on the logistics of retail, trade, and delivery, the relevant markets are more appropriately defined at the national level. Here, we see how Amazon and Alibaba dominate online commerce 16 both reporting incredible market shares in their home bases – Alibaba with 44% of the market in China17 and Amazon with almost 50-55% in the US18. Yet, that is not all, Amazon also holds an incredible share of markets in Germany - where 1 in every 2 euros spent online is processed by Amazon19 - France, Italy, and Spain where between 70 to 90% of all online shoppers use Amazon20