Three reflections from big tech policy lab

 Two weeks back, I participated in a policy lab organised by Tandem Research at their workplace in Aldona, Goa. This was part of an Omidyar Network India funded study into big tech in India – the players, practices, and implications.

The beautiful settings in Goa and being away from the bustle of a metropolitan city allowed participants to more fully put on their thinking hats. Moreover, Tandem brought together an extremely diverse group of individuals who represented very different ideologies and professional backgrounds.

 Consequently, the discussions were wide-ranging and extremely rich. I realised that opening yourself to a very different point of view helps stretch your own thinking. Even when I found myself disagreeing vehemently with another participant, it helped me think of an argument that I hadn’t previously articulated. Overall, I found the two days extremely thought-provoking, and left me looking forward to more of Tandem’s work on this topic.

 In particular, I want to draw your attending to three insights that stood out for me. Because of Chatham house rules, I am not identifying the specific individuals who said these things:

 (1) There is no single big tech – the group spent a lot of time discussing what big team means. Purely size-based measures like number of users or market capitalisation are clearly insufficient because they do not account for the power these platforms hold over our lives. However, the kind of power they hold itself is very varied. Twitter and Facebook are very different from Uber and Amazon, which in turn are nothing like Microsoft. Trying to lump all of them together in this nebulous term ‘big tech’ does disservice to the resultant classification. Instead, it would make sense to look at 3-5 more homogenous groups such as communications networks (facebook, twitter), impersonal marketplaces (uber, amazon), B2B enterprise and the like.

(2) Big tech is indeed special – I frequently grapple with the question of whether big tech is actually unique. The history of capitalism is littered with examples of excessive concentration of power in a few business entities. However, one of the participants at the conference made an excellent point that some big tech platforms find themselves regulating constitutionally-given rights like the right to speech. They also govern the digital equivalent of rights such as the right to assembly. This makes big tech fairly unique even when you compare to earlier constructs such as big pharma or big oil. In fact, this raises the expectation of good conduct that previous incarnations of monopolistic capitalism did not have.

 (3) Government's shadow influence shouldn’t be ignored – treating big tech as purely private entities prevents us from holistically considering the topic at hand. Countries believe that big tech companies are important, with US President Trump threatening France with a retaliatory tax for imposing a revenue-based tax on ‘American’ big tech. But purely market-based reasoning is insufficient. After all, big tech contributes very little tax revenue to the US itself. Instead, the group discussed underlying reasons such as the race for digital supremacy, the military-industrial complex, and plain old national price. Many participants felt that, on balance, big tech companies are actually quite powerless and are mere chess pieces in the big game between large countries.