Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Move fast and break Big Tech’s power

Diego Naranjo 27th July 2021

‘Surveillance capitalism’ can only be regulated on at least a European scale—and the mood for change is growing.

Digital Services Act,DSA,Digital Markets Act,DMA,Big Tech
Diego Naranjo

We are living in an era of Big Tech dominance, which has issued in an economy described by Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism’. Much needs to change for the digital world to respect citizens’ rights, instead of catering only to ever-expanding greed.

The European Union—as other regulatory global regions—is set to change the status quo by proposing a set of new laws and rules. These attempt, on the one hand, to reform the way in which online platforms can be held accountable for their actions (the Digital Services Act) and, on the other, to impose stricter rules on platforms which abuse their position as digital gatekeepers to avoid competition (the Digital Markets Act).

Will these rules, the DSA and DMA, be enough to tame Big Tech?

Handful of corporations

As we rely on technology to live, work, study or secure essential services, the power of a handful of corporations is ever-growing. While Facebook mediates the social lives and personal messages of over three billion people, Google has taken control of mobile devices, email inboxes and search queries. Delivery companies now use algorithms to send orders to their drivers—or automatically fire them if the articifial intelligence determines they under-perform—and Amazon not only sells books but also centralises most of the world’s cloud-computing capacity.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

When the pandemic hit, Big Tech was ready to ‘help’ in the preparation of Covid-19 tracing applications and Google tried to dominate even more public school systems—all of this ‘for free’.  Some companies, such as Amazon, are so powerful that they are not only monopolies but exercise ‘digital feudalism’: everyone and everything belongs to, or depends on, the same technology overlord.

The surveillance-based business model of the dominant technology companies is based on extracting as much personal information and profiling as possible to target individuals, on- and offline.  Over time, Big Tech corporations build a frighteningly detailed picture about billions of individuals—and that knowledge directly translates into (market) power.

Personal data extraction

This enables the platforms to ensure users stay connected. The longer eyes are glued to the screen, the more personalised advertisements can be displayed and the more personal data can be extracted (and profit accumulated).

Platforms call this ‘engagement’ but in reality it’s just viewers consuming more adverts. Companies such as Facebook are incentivised to keep rival groups of users ‘engaged’ by polarising society with misinformation and other content which undermines democracy.

This is compounded by lock-in: an individual may have joined Facebook out of interest but if she leaves she will lose all her connections there. ‘I have to be on this platform because everybody else is’ is to economists a ‘network effect’—a powerful lever for large platforms to cement their dominance.

We arrived at this point because of the neoliberal wave which led to politicians on both sides of the Atlantic deciding not to regulate internet companies—companies which in some cases started and grew with substantial public funding. The tide has finally turned, though, as citizens, non-governmental organisations, academics, international institutions and policy-makers alike have seen the undeniable impacts of unregulated private companies on human rights and are becoming increasingly active on the issue. Even national and transnational administrations—especially the EU—see there is a need to stop this madness.

Three solutions

European Digital Rights (EDRi) suggests three types of solution, which would drastically improve the digital-platform environment for the benefit of all.

Introduce strong regulation and enforcement to phase out the surveillance-based business model: from the Tracking Free Ads Coalition in the European Parliament and Stop Stalker Ads to the global Ban Surveillance Advertising and the European Data Protection Supervisor, there is a broad understanding that targeted online advertising should be privacy-preserving and human-centred. It should not enable technology corporations to manipulate public debate—or allow others to do so. The goal is to tackle the systemic sources of a business model which promotes the circulation of harmful and polarising content and misinformation.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Regulate such systemic problems of the platform economy, not online speech: a holistic, human-rights approach to content moderation should ensure safe participation and expression for all. While it might seem logical that those who profit from harmful content ‘going viral’ should be responsible for its impact, the EU should not create regulatory incentives for platforms to remove legitimate content. Human-rights defenders often rely on platforms to expose all sorts of atrocities but trusting these companies with yet more unregulated power over content would lead to bigger problems—as evidenced by the silencing of Palestinian activists on ‘social media’ and of political activists in Europe. While we encourage transparent reporting and access to remedies for victims of harm, we also advocate a rule-of-law approach which speedily helps victims yet protects legitimate speech.

Empower users and promote the re-decentralisation of the web: strong competition laws should be put in place and the commission should enforce them. Tomasso Valletti, chief competition economist at the commission from 2016 until 2019, exposed the shocking inaction on competition in the Big Tech sector: ‘GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) have acquired more than 1,000 firms in the past 20 years, and zero of those transactions have been blocked—and 97 per cent were not even assessed by anybody.’ Indeed, many of these recent mergers have created huge privacy and data-protection concerns: Google and FitBit and Facebook and WhatsApp are two of the best-known examples.

In addition, individuals should be empowered to leave privacy-invasive, gatekeeper platforms for equivalent services without losing access to connections, preferences and shared content. One of EDRi’s core demands on the DMA and DSA is mandatory inter-operability (so individuals can use alternatives to Big Tech platforms and operating systems) for gatekeepers or very large platforms. Contrary to the original commission proposal, we insist that mandated inter-operability should include core services, such as third-party content moderation and recommender systems.

Overwhelming public support

The DSA and the DMA could become two cornerstones of a radically-changed environment for how citizens use technology and are affected by it. By adding stronger enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a robust ePrivacy Regulation and the envisaged Artificial Intelligence Act, the impact on the regulation of digital technologies could be profound.

Change is at hand, the public are overwhelmingly in support and policy-makers are coming to see why it is necessary too. All those striving for a more equal, just and fair society need to make this happen now.

Diego Naranjo 1
Diego Naranjo

Diego Naranjo is head of policy at European Digital Rights (EDRi).

You are here: Home / Politics / Move fast and break Big Tech’s power

Most Popular Posts

Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic
Orbán,Hungary,Russia,Putin,sanctions,European Union,EU,European Parliament,commission,funds,funding Time to confront Europe’s rogue state—HungaryStephen Pogány

Most Recent Posts

reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl
Jacinda Ardern,women,leadership,New Zealand What it means when Jacinda Ardern calls timePeter Davis

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube