In the Media
THE TELEGRAPH: I tried to survive 24 hours without using ‘Big Five’ tech – and my life became impossible
03. 30. 2024
You may not realise it, but the DNA of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple dominates so much of what we do
This article was originally published by The Telegaph.
To make a point about the tech giants’ monopoly, an American charity called the Economic Security Project created “Big Tech Detective”, a free browser plug-in that allows you to track and avoid all websites that use technology from Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google. I start by installing it on my laptop. Its purpose is to allow users to see for themselves just how much of the internet’s infrastructure rests on just four or five companies.
At first, Big Tech Detective works well – so well, in fact, that browsing the internet is almost impossible. In fact, the results are startling. Every website I try to visit for research, by using the search bar in Chrome, with Big Tech Detective installed, is locked because it uses resources provided by either Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Facebook or Microsoft.