Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Cory Doctorow
“The companies we call ‘Big Tech’ — Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, etc. — attained their scale and reach primarily by buying out their potential competitors, not by inventing new technologies that were so amazing that they beat the competition. … These companies converted the net to ‘five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four,’ replacing the dream of ‘disintermediation’ with a new oligarchy of gatekeepers. Together, these companies rigged the ad-market, the app market, and the market for social media. The result is a system that pleases no one — except the tech monopolists’ shareholders.” (05/17/23)