Anti-Anti-Big Tech

There’s a lot to critique in big tech. I spent nearly a decade of my life inside Google at the moment of its incredible growth from 2014-2023, and saw firsthand the pros and pitfalls of big tech’s approach to their field — from Ads policy fights between different teams representing different governments, to Cloud’s public sector go-to-market strategy generally, to preparing technical documentation for senior execs for meetings with some of the most powerful people in the world. Often these projects were just as hard to wrangle within the company as with our customer, as projects that crossed teams also crossed product and program owners each with their own agenda. Big Tech businesses are often noted for their small team size & ‘flatness’ compared to other industries, and in practice meaning that the bigger the issue the more individual owners to wrangle and organize.

That same flatness can create internal clashes that spill out into the public arena – fights between product and research teams, fights leading to frequent product deprecations, fights like the AI safety teams clashing publicly with leadership leading to high-profile exits, and so on.

Many of the concerns with big tech today boil down to reach & trust, where a diffusion of responsibility across teams can create real issues. These platforms reach billions of users, and by funneling them all to Google.com or Amazon listings or a single TikTok page the risk of mishandling even a single algorithm to unexpected bad ends grows significantly.

GDPR and CCPA were good & positive laws that helped reshape the web and user privacy standards around the idea of first party control. These laws rejected the standard of the time where the industry relied heavily on Google and Apple to provide their respective digital ID formats that covered almost everyone online, seeing that backbone as not properly resting in the arms of just a couple big tech companies. Those changes have given users more control over their data with more transparency, more opt-in/out options, and the wide variety of ‘user IDs’ generated today which are generally created during interactions with first party rather than third party domains and digital services.

These successes are due to policies that looked at the data itself and found reasons for regulatory change to balance the burgeoning tech industry’s growth with user interests. Real standards like these that drive industry change have big impact, while legislation or policies tailored to punish individual actors, like the EU often does, typically do not improve industry-wide outcomes.

This brings me to my Anti-Anti-Big Tech belief. Read modern critiques of big tech today and you’d think these companies invented a panopticon of digital horrors trapping us all, and who doing nothing but sitting around a table all day trying to think of ways to stick it to Americans for a buck.

It almost doesn’t matter who you read. Arielle Garcia writing in CheckMyAds believes Google is in a “cultural breakdown akin to cancer,” is literally “evil,” creates a global “culture of silence and fear,” “lies to everyone,” uses the business org IAB which helps sets industry standards as a “shameless google lobby” and so on.

Rather than making actual critiques, advocacy groups would rather make a show of dressing up as the monopoly guy and following around the VP of public policy in stunts while casually tossing out claims of apocalypse:

The case that moneybags was following Kent Walker around for just announced it was going to trial, related to monopolizing the pipes of digital advertising. The anti-monopoly lawsuit looks specifically at the way Google apparently combined Google's AdX and DoubleClick for Publishers data, perhaps unlawfully favoring their own networks.

There is a legitimate critique here – selling ad space and providing the tool to publishers who then bid on that ad space opens the possibility of rigging the market. Outside this case, you would expect advocates who have been following it for years to have legitimate policy answers to the question of where the lines should be, related to a strong user and industry-based interest.

But you don’t see that at all. Similar to the article and costume above, anti-big tech advocates are happy with the status quo as long as they extract some fees from the current winners. Apparently serious big-tech antitrust thought leaders like Matt Stoller compare Google Execs to Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly, or constantly tell followers that big tech companies are a bigger threat to democracy than Trump and who are focused on “erasing our common traditions.” 

Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University Law Professor spends her time telling hundreds of thousands of people that Big Tech ‘murdered’ journalism by intentionally stealing ad revenue (that apparently was the god given right of news outlets), that Facebook runs ‘on the exploitation of children’, and so on.

Even Lina Khan, the chair of the FTC called big tech companies “mob bosses” this week deserving of the same treatment as actual crime rings.

These aren’t some random people I found, the examples above represent some of the biggest names and “thought leaders” in anti-big tech policy. And they almost all could not be more counter-productive if they tried.

I think the aesthetics of these critiques are trashy and unserious, but your mileage may vary on whether you go for broad sweeping ideological word vomit these days. Regardless of what you think about the statements themselves, it’s leading to extremely counter productive outcomes in the overall discussion of digital rights and user privacy.

Rather than use their stations to help set standards as this substack has repeatedly called for, these sweeping arguments lead to sweeping cases that get dismissed out of hand for trying to do too much in a courtroom defined by discrete harms.

Amazon has prevailed twice in antitrust cases accusing them of ‘forcing’ sellers to pay higher fees “undercutting the free market.” This overly broad critique was tossed due to “lack of factual details in the complaint.”

Lina Khan’s own FTC case against Meta was dismissed in 2021 due to being ‘legally insufficient’ to show harm, as you actually have to define a market that is harmed if you’re claiming Meta has destroyed it, with the apt summary line in the case that the FTC “had provided no proof for its assertion that Facebook held a monopoly position in social networking, but, instead, seemed to assume that everyone simply saw it that way.”

Similarly, Khan brought a failed suit against Microsoft’s acquisition of Blizzard games, calling it “this merger poses a clear threat to open competition in cloud gaming, subscription services, and consoles.” The court disagreed, writing “To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content.” 

Of course, Stoller (the guy from above) chimed in to blame the judiciary as a corrupt institution: ″[W]hen a Biden judge – whose son works at Microsoft — lets the biggest tech merger of all time go through, we have a serious problem with the judiciary.” Is that what anti big tech advocates truly believe? They are losing because the judiciary is not complicit in their schemes? Who else is in on this big conspiracy? The Trumpian turn to treat obviously losing arguments as proof of corruption is not compelling.

These losses are all made worse because there really are legitimate critiques about antitrust, marketing defining-moves, and M&A that you can make about big tech. The Epic Games v. Apple suit, brought not by ideologues but by a company with a specific gripe around a specific harm, saw a similar court dismissal of the over-the-top claims of antitrust BUT importantly set the stage for the EU passing legislation to accept third party payments, with similar laws being considered in the US, which would create an actual improvement in small businesses ability to stay relevant without having to hand over double-digits percentages of their app-based revenue to Apple. Progress! At last!

These cases show that the default of putting the individual companies at the forefront of the policy debate, rather than focusing on regulating underlying data systems themselves is the big problem. Youth advertising issues wouldn't be nearly as much of a persistent problem if there was a more publicly-created and publicly-available method to verify user age and identity than web cookies and user-input alone. Journalists relying for decades on paper-based classified ads need a different model to revitalize their business in the digital age just like every other industry in the world, rather than blame big tech for their sliding irrelevance while doing nothing but trying to extract fees from them directly. Rules around DSP/SSP interaction with different media network and/or content providers should simply be formalized in a set of rules with the explosion in new media networks rather than a slew of monopoly lawsuits which again have to prove extremely specific harms.

More time should be spent working with customers and users of these platforms facing personal harms and less on trying to prove capitalism wrong vis-a-vis big tech takedown think pieces that influence no one and go nowhere in court. I recommend Stratechery and Platformer who do a better job as normal journalists of understanding these issues and proposing potential solutions than the actual advocacy industry does.

You’d think that the advocates in these cases, from Stoller to Khan to Teachout would be frustrated with constantly being on the losing end of these battles. But the tactics and strategy remain the same – go after specific companies and use sweeping arguments that fail to meet the standard of harm that our entire justice system depends on. We all deserve better advocates.