Rein in Big Tech

Take action to challenge the power of Big Tech.

Vision
The Challenge
What We Do

Latest Resources

Event Highlights: Designing a Public AI Workshop

10. 02. 2024

Building a New Political Economy for AI

06. 04. 2024

THE TELEGRAPH: I tried to survive 24 hours without using ‘Big Five’ tech – and my life became impossible

03. 30. 2024

POLITICO: How States Can Keep Big Tech from Dominating AI

03. 13. 2024

ABC NEWS: What to know about landmark AI regulations proposed in California

02. 10. 2024

Antimonopoly in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Chris Hughes and Ganesh Sitaraman

10. 25. 2023

Vision

We’re renewing democracy in the digital economy to promote fair markets where users, small business leaders, workers, and communities of color can thrive, not just monopolies.

The Challenge

Digital platforms are transforming how we interact with the world, but the dynamics of the digital economy — where companies have incentives to vertically integrate across markets and consolidate economic power and data to achieve economies of scale and network effects — have also given rise to a few dominant players with immense private power. And it’s not just a matter of sheer market power, either. This economic power often translates into power over our democracy and society. When they hold so much unprecedented power over so much virtual real estate, it precludes any real competition.

Some of these digital platforms — Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple — were the focus of a thorough 16-month investigation by Congress into the competitive dynamics of digital markets, led by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee. In October 2020, the investigation culminated in a 450-page report outlining how Big Tech’s dominance in cloud computing, digital advertising, and other markets enables them to unfairly distort markets, rig the rules, and pick winners and losers.

Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets

One of the report’s major conclusions is that these platforms have such outsized market power that we need new rules and legislation to address these structural inequities, because our economic system is skewing the incentives toward accumulating monopoly power.

What We Do

To counter concentrated power in the digital economy, we educate the public on the monopoly problem; run creative, sharp campaigns focused on antimonopoly action; and support the field to integrate an antimonopoly approach into tech policy.

Our Big Tech Detective browser extension lets users see for themselves how much of the internet’s infrastructure Big Tech controls. Inspired by investigative journalist Kashmir Hill’s “Goodbye Big Five” series in Gizmodo, we worked with Alden Rivendale Jones, Dhruv Mehrotra (who had worked with Hill on the original series), and Emily Lin to scale up the tool and temporarily cut off Big Tech’s access to our digital lives.

Use Big Tech Detective