People stop trusting the giants without limit. Efforts to regulate platforms are growing

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Big tech companies are slowly getting used to the fact that laws don’t apply to them. After all, you cannot do innovative services that make the world a better place with an army of lawyers behind you. This fairy tale was enticing and at least not intentionally false.

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I’ve visited America’s Silicon Valley many times and whenever I can I stop by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Here you will find a huge number of period exhibits from the entire 20th century. Stories of innovation, experimentation, exponential growth and contagious DIY enthusiasm will blow your mind.

And it is therefore not surprising that a techno-optimistic belief in unbridled innovation prevailed in technological circles for a long time, which managed to infect even the majority of the public. “Politicians, hands off Silicon Valley,” wrote Michael Arrington, an American tech journalist and entrepreneur, in 2010. “Stop urinating in our garden.” In his commentary, he complained about the government’s “empty promises” and “irreparably destroyed trust” in it.

Back then, Arrington could write all this and know that the majority opinion would be on his side. I don’t have specific numbers on this, but I believe that if you asked a hundred random people (not just in the US) at that time, “Do you believe that Google/Apple/Facebook or the government will improve your life more?”, the answer would be heavily skewed towards the so-called Big Tech companies.

After almost fifteen years, however, the tide is turning. Not that people would trust the government any more. There’s really no danger of that. But the public is gradually putting off the rose-colored glasses and starting to notice the enormous impact of technology on our lives. And while between the years 1960 and 2010 we would most likely summarize those impacts as being rather positive in sum, in the last fifteen years serious cracks are appearing in this sunny vision of “innovation makes the world a better place”.

Shared mobility has brought sidewalks full of discarded e-scooters, cheap online shopping is bought out by the collapse of brick-and-mortar stores, flexible mobile platforms offer cheap services often at the expense of the rights of employees (who are no longer employees). People find themselves trapped by platforms and ecosystems and it is difficult for them to jump out of this trap.

These are not new problems. I would even say that they were predictable long before 2010. But while fifteen years ago we believed the promise of big tech companies that they were “not evil” and that they were “making the world a better place”, now that trust is much weaker.

I’m not saying tech companies are inherently evil at all. I am not suggesting that there is some coordinated design or conspiracy behind the negative effects. And I’m not at all saying that we should give up everything electronic and go back to the cave. After all, these are frequent false arguments against any regulation: Either you give us a free hand and you can look forward to more wonderful breathtaking innovations, or… there is a door (cave entrance).

But recent events show that a new chapter is beginning, which has been in the making for many years. States, governments and institutions are looking for ways to regulate the online environment without stifling the spirit of innovation. It is a complicated and non-trivial task. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and I don’t even know how I want it to turn out. But I’m glad we’re moving away from boundless confidence to a more pragmatic approach.

Innovation is important. But they are not sacred. Innovation is useful. But they are not inevitable. In order to come up with a useful product, someone must think outside the box. But it does not have to trample the achievements of modern society, such as the right to privacy, to competitive competition, to protection from health risks or the protection of individual rights. Hopefully it will be easier to discuss it now.

Of course, each of us has our own complicated life path, during which we gradually shape our relationship to new technologies. We all oscillate somewhere between fanboy enthusiasm for every operating system update and a hermit’s sigh at how in the “good old days” people were still human. I myself can occupy several different positions at the same time between these extremes.

But the overall social mood seems to be more favorable to attempts to regulate and “tame” large technological monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies than it was even a year ago. This is evidenced, for example, by the US Department of Justice’s new lawsuit against Apple, the world’s largest company. In 88 pages, he lists in a rather readable form the whole range of impacts of how “Apple is abusing its monopoly position in the mobile phone market”. For example, how it distributes apps using its closed store, takes a disproportionate share of payments, or makes it impossible to use competing smartwatches.

Next came my favorite “green bubble phobia”: Apple deliberately and systematically prevents full iMessages from being sent to anything other than iPhones and iPads.

This then leads to the fact that in any group of users who want to have fun with each other, there is a lot of social pressure on everyone to buy nothing but an iPhone. If they do, their communication bubbles will turn green, and the entire group (including iPhone users) will suddenly lose a number of features, including free messaging or quality video messaging.

I could probably immediately write a defense for Apple on almost every point of the indictment. Something along the lines of “a closed system is safe, people have the option to go elsewhere and closing it like this makes it work a lot better for us”. But it’s clear that a number of complaints are falling on fertile ground, even from people who are generally Apple fans.

I liked the comment of the editor-in-chief of The Verge, who we certainly cannot suspect of “hating modern technology”. He describes what he sees as a common thread connecting the lawsuit to a similar lawsuit in 2001, US v. Microsoft: “It’s trying to show that Apple is now behaving much like Microsoft was in the 1990s. How Microsoft tried to suffocate competing browsers or Java, and we stopped it.”

“And by preventing Microsoft from suffocating the competition, a number of companies were able to grow,” recalls Patel. They were, for example, Google or Apple. “Microsoft once tried to remove QuickTime from Windows.”

It is actually such a perhaps idealistic, but at the same time verified cycle: Strong platforms of the present give rise to the platforms of the future. Microsoft itself was able to grow by building on the IBM platform. Google was also able to grow because there was an ecosystem of personal computers, most often with Windows. And Apple was able to gain its position thanks to the fact that Windows did not prohibit connecting the PC to the iPod and later the iPhone. “Each next layer builds on the previous one. And Apple basically banned anyone else from growing on top of it,” Patel summarized.

It is unclear whether the lawsuit will succeed in the US courts. Perhaps it will end in an out-of-court settlement, as is often the case with similar disputes. Meanwhile, the European Union is investigating Google, Apple and Meta for their role in restricting user/customer freedom and abusing their dominant positions. It’s yet another demonstration that big tech companies are no longer untouchable.

Therefore, in the coming weeks and months, we will hear different variations on the threats “so if you don’t want our innovations, go back to the trees, no one is forcing you”. Take them with a grain of salt. There is plenty of room for meaningful debate between “back to the trees” and “give us all your data and hold the display”.

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