A new antitrust probe of Google led by 50 US attorneys general is the opening shot in a long overdue campaign to rein in America’s tech giants. Speaking on the steps of the US Supreme Court, Texas AG Ken Paxton observed that Google “dominate[s] the buyer side, the seller side, the auction side and the video side with YouTube” – a monopoly which will generate an estimated US$48 billion in ad revenue this year. The probe comes at a moment when EU regulators have moved against what the Europeans call GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and other analysts call FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) for predatory and anti-competitive behaviour. Every week seems to bring new disclosures about how they have shared user data and the nefarious uses to which the exploited data have been put. Collectively the revelations raise troubling questions about the standard operating procedures within what has been well described as “surveillance capitalism.”
Duopolies like Facebook and Google – which currently receive 60 percent of America’s 130 billion digital ad revenue – have cornered markets in predicting our behaviour mainly because almost none of us realizes how much data we surrender to them. Mostly this is because we lack the time and expertise to decipher the user agreements. Consider the Nest system, which monitors thermostats in a smart home. A recent study at the University of London found that informed consent to its data sharing provisions would require an individual to review nearly a thousand legal contracts. Harvard Business professor Shoshana Zuboff, a leading scholar in this area calls this absurd arrangement an “uncontract” because the absence of informed consent ”desocializes the contract, manufacturing certainty through the substitution of automated procedures for promises … and it does so for the sake of more-lucrative prediction products that approximate observation and therefore guarantee outcomes.”
The profits produced by manipulating our behaviour through data mining are immense. Take Instagram, for example. The first photo posted via the app appeared in July 2010 – shortly after its founders gave up on a more ambitious data sharing project. Eighteen months later the app was worth more than the parent company for the New York Times. When Facebook acquired the company in 2011, for US$1 billion, many analysts thought it had overpaid. But Facebook knew that the app’s 30 million users – now 1 billion – would yield behavioural data worth much more than the apparently inflated valuation. Today Instagram generates between US$8 and 9 billion in revenues for Facebook each year. Other big tech companies have experienced similar surges in surveillance-driven revenue.
The new antitrust probe has been launched despite considerable anti-regulatory pressure from Big Tech. During the last decade, for instance, Facebook increased its outlay on lobbying fifty-fold – donating US$4.6 million during the 2016 elections and spending US$11 million on lobbying in 2017. Even so, it has received multi-billion dollar fines for lapses in data privacy and faces an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice and, along with other Big Tech companies, a bipartisan probe from Congress’ antitrust subcommittee.
What is impressive about these crackdowns is that even at a moment when US politics seems riddled with dysfunctions , the system can still respond meaningfully to anti-competitive behaviour. Big Tech also knows that if either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders becomes the next US president it will face even tougher regulation. But for countries with less robust regulatory mechanisms, these developments should raise warning flags about the amount of data we allow surveillance-driven companies to take from us, and how we monitor the ways that they gather, share, and use our private information for self-interested and profit-seeking motives.
