Big anything is usually a net negative. When they behave they’re mostly alright, but most often they misbehave, see Apple and their childish responses or MS eating up competition (xbox absorbing every single studio).
Small and mid-sized is better for competition. It’s also not “too big to fail”, ie. if it collapses, a bailout isn’t ““needed””. Big tech if it collapses, should be nationalised.
Exactly. There should be no big tech. Massive companies are ultimately a negative to society. No company should be able to create walled gardens, consolidate vertically up supply chains or horizontally across industries.
Society will continue the downward spiral until there are enforced limits that encourage interoperability and competing on quality/price instead of artificial barriers, profit sharing with workers and tax payers instead of maximum greed, and overall redistribution of wealth to prevent parasites from forming to begin with.
I agree with all of you, but…
We need institutions that can both challenge and rival Big Tech. EU has been doing okay, great in comparison, regulating Big Tech. Small to medium companies have big part of the market, but are constantly eaten up big bigger ones, and have hard time combating many mono/duopolies (like mail or social media, which technically are easy to keep diversified).
I don’t know what is the answer. Federation that do not collaborate with Big Tech - thank you, Fedi - are a great way forward. Consumer movements (e.g., Buy European) and smaller companies getting their niches working with Big Tech and only slowly diverging from it (see, e.g., Ecosia) can also have an impact.
The article poses a wrong question. But a related question is interesting: How do we challenge Big Tech at scale? In this sense, Europe not having any tech giants might be lucky for the world at large, as we still have enough power, talent, and influence to pose the challenge. How do we do that?
TL;DR taxes and countries fragmentation / globalization shit
Because we learned ffom the time of guillotines. Sadly, our dejected gene pool decided to relive the indias company days across the pond.
