Big Tech Research Articles

Governments and Markets in the Digital Age

Abstract The academic literature has revamped its interest in economic statecraft, geoeconomics, geopoliticization of trade and technology sectors, and in the role of value chains as vectors for exerting control over critical technologies. However, there has been less reflection on state-market relations in the production of technological innovation and on the evolution of government business relations. Four recent books address these two important issues from different angles. Mazzucato and Mallaby’s books focus on the right mix of state and market needed to stimulate technological innovation, and they do so from opposite perspectives. Chen and Ripley’s books look, respectively, at the rise of Tencent as one of China’s major big tech companies and the rise of SpaceX as a key private player in the traditionally state-led US space market. These two books are therefore of interest to gauge the evolving relations between government and private businesses in two key areas of current geopolitical competition, the digital and the space sectors. The aim of this review essay is not only to briefly summarize the content of these books and their strengths and weaknesses, but also to use them as a starting point to reflect on the mix of state and market in the production of innovation, and on government-businesses relations in digital markets.

Chasing scale: the pasts and futures of mobility in electricity and logistics

In this article, I theorize the long arc of scaling as an enduring business logic in capitalism. I suggest that scaling concerns the creation of new distances in economic operations and the management of mobility for goods, services, and people. I further argue that automation indexes a continuation of scaling as the management of mobility—a practice that industrialists have inherited from the 20th century. While the scholarship on scalability has recently focused on Big Tech, I center my analysis on two older and less public-facing industries—electricity service and maritime logistics—both of which have been scalability’s pioneers and innovators from the 20th century onwards. Today, like many others, both industries look to automation to take scale to greater heights, as can be noted in the examples of energy aggregator technologies and automated guided vehicles used in unloading containers. For contemporary scaling industries, automation appears as a suitable ‘scalar device’ (Ribes 2014) especially where obstacles to the smooth mobility of goods, services, and people are perceived to occur due to human limitations in cognition and action. However, automated technologies, despite the sense of novelty they may impart, perpetuate old corporate ambitions of action-at-a-distance.

Digital sovereignty, economic ideas, and the struggle over the digital markets act: a political-cultural approach

ABSTRACT Digital market regulations respond to technological changes and global dynamics, but also to how political actors shape markets. Focusing on the Digital Markets Act, this article explains the EU’s marketcraft as the result of a struggle in the policy field between political actors promoting competing economic ideas in a rapidly evolving technological and geopolitical context. We show that significant discursive and policy change in digital market governance has occurred because of shifting coalitions between three constellations of actors, which we call market-correctors, market-busters, and market-directors. Tracking the ongoing campaign to challenge Big Tech and define the meaning of digital sovereignty, we argue that market-directors have ushered in potentially comprehensive policy change.

Rebooting Amsterdam for the age of Big Tech: Platform capitalism, reintermediation, and financial-center change

The platformization of finance and the financial inroads made by tech firms large and small raises questions about the extent to which financial centers and their incumbent inhabitants retain their positions as key intermediaries in financial(ized) intermediation. Focusing on cloud adoption and digital payments in post-2008 Amsterdam, we study how and to what extent financial platformization entails the ‘rebooting’ of the Amsterdam financial center, by investigating (i) the changing composition and spatial structure of its inhabitants; (ii) the platformization of incumbent financial institutions and the rise of new intermediaries, and (iii) deepening interdependencies between financial institutions and Big Tech. We find that platform companies have come to inhabit both the city center and the Zuidas financial district at the expense of incumbent finance and other advanced producer services (APS). Along with the growing footprint of resident platform companies, typically relying on Big Tech cloud services, we identify growing interdependencies between finance and tech, as illustrated by the adoption of Big Tech cloud services among financial institutions old and new. To illuminate patterns of competition and collaboration between incumbent finance, Fintech and Big Tech, we foreground incumbent bank ING and Fintech Adyen, a payments services provider (PSP), and analyze their relations with tech giant Amazon. In the payments domain, we see new intermediaries like Adyen assume functions at the expense of incumbent APS intermediaries, including banks. In sum, we conclude that the rise of platform capitalism is progressively giving way to financial reintermediation and financial-center change, with tech companies forming an increasingly dominant sector within a platformizing para-financial APS complex, and with Big Tech assuming a growing yet uneven infrastructural role.

Freedom of expression and the metaverse: on the importance of content creation for the emergence of a complex environment

This research analyzes the importance of the freedom of expression in the creation of the metaverse, in a context of increasing power of Big Techs in the digital environment. As its results, technical knowledge related to many areas and creativity are fundamental for the creation of the metaverse. Thus, its creation must be democratized. Public policies ensuring ways to access content creation must be developed, and such a democratization must be based on freedom of expression. And limitations to the exercise of such freedom must not be subjected to private interests of huge corporations, nor moderated solely by technological tools. Methodology: hypothetical-deductive method of procedure, with a qualitative and transdisciplinary approach, and a bibliographic review research technique.

Bad adopters or bad proponents of technology? Facebook and the violence against Muslims in Myanmar

The violence towards the Rohingya people in Myanmar has been well documented, with Facebook serving as a key site for the proliferation of anti-Muslim hate speech in the country. There are differing explanations as to the extent and significance of its role in contributing to this conflict. Some analyses have cited Myanmar’s internal deficiencies, framing the country as a bad adopter of technologies. These depictions rarely consider the broader conditions of technological adoption that extend beyond Myanmar’s borders. In this paper, we connect science, technology, and innovation (STI) work and decolonial analysis to highlight how Facebook’s activities in Myanmar are better understood as inextricably linked to the utopian and ‘techno-solutionist’ narratives mobilised by companies, particularly when deploying their technology in lower-income countries. The case study of Facebook’s role in Myanmar exemplifies how developing states can become understood as scapegoats when the promises behind new technologies are not realised. These practices obscure the role that Big Tech proponents of technology can play in generating internal crises in the Global South. They illustrate how certain ways of thinking about and promoting technology can play a role in reinscribing hegemonic colonial dynamics, something that is not unique to Myanmar and can produce broader material harm.

Surveillance Capitalism in Mental Health: When Good Apps Go Rogue (and What Can Be Done about It)

Research shows that a large proportion of the world’s population has experience with mental health difficulties, and reliable as well as scalable care is urgently needed. Digital mental health seems to be an obvious solution to provide the better delivery of care but also the delivery of better care. With an imagined future of real-time information sharing, improved diagnosis and monitoring of mental health conditions, and remote care, supported by advances in artificial intelligence, many tech companies have emerged over the last three decades to plug the treatment gap and provide services. The evidence base seems compelling: some online treatments have the capability to treat individuals quite successfully. However, the introduction, utilisation, and expansion of digital mental health technologies have not always focused on public health only. Using a surveillance capitalism perspective, this paper approaches the democratisation–privatisation dichotomy in digital mental health with a critical lens. In particular, the paper details how (commercially valuable) mental health data are extracted, “shared”, and claimed as an asset by big tech companies. Reviewing the terms, conditions, and practices of ten popular mental health apps, the paper polemically argues that mental digital health cannot unlock real value for society—better treatment, good quality care, and efficient delivery—if power, politics, and profits remain in the hands of big tech companies. To conclude, the paper draws attention to contemporary discourses that seek to promote democracy and public value for digital mental health apps, technologies, and solutions.

Towards the Future of Public Health: Roadmapping Trends and Scenarios in the Post-COVID Healthcare Era.

The COVID-19 pandemic, a transformative event in modern society, has disrupted routine, work, behavior, and human relationships. Organizations, amidst the chaos, have innovatively adapted to the evolving situation. However, many countries were unprepared for the magnitude of the challenge, revealing the fragility of health responses due to inadequate leadership, insufficient resources, and poor information system integration. Structural changes in health systems are imperative, particularly in leadership, governance, human resources, financing, information systems, technology, and health service provision. This research utilizes the Technological Roadmapping method to analyze the health sector, focusing on public health, drawing on articles from SCOPUS and PubMed databases, and creating a roadmap extending to 2050. The research presents three long-term scenarios based on the literature-derived roadmap and explores various alternatives, including integrated care, telemedicine, Big Data utilization, nanotechnology, and Big Tech's AI services. The results underscore the anticipation of post-pandemic public health with high expectations, emphasizing the importance of integrating health history access, encouraging self-care, and leveraging technology for streamlined treatment. Practical implications include insights for decision makers and stakeholders to inform strategic planning and adapt to evolving industry demands, recognizing the significance of preventive services and the humanizing potential of technology.

Dynamic Competition, Price Frictions and Institution Building: the CMA in 2022–2023

This article discusses three projects of economic significance that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) completed in the last year: First, we discuss the dynamic competition concerns that were at the heart of the CMA’s analysis of the Meta/GIPHY merger; this was the first case of a competition authority’s blocking an acquisition by one of the ‘Big Tech’ firms. Second, our work on the road fuels market study examined pricing behaviour in an important consumer-facing market and found that competition had weakened because historic price leaders have been taking a less aggressive approach to pricing, Third, we established a new research centre—the Microeconomics Unit—to bring economic expertise on competition, innovation, and productivity closer to regulatory and policy decisions.

Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy by Tom Kemp

Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy by Tom Kemp

Feminism against Progress

Feminism against Progress

Do Technology Startups Replicate Internationalization Patterns From Big Companies? Evidence From Latin America

This article discusses the internationalization of technology startups in Latin America. The study analyzed 121 startups from five countries using a quantitative approach and data was collected from the Crunchbase platform. Results indicate that Argentinean, Chilean, and Colombian startups have faster internationalization trajectories than their Brazilian and Mexican counterparts, which tend to remain local during initial stages following the Uppsala model pattern. Our study on startup internationalization in Latin America yielded comparable results to big tech companies from these countries. However, we noticed that Mexican startups have better access to financial support receiving double the investment compared to other organizations. These finding provide valuable insights into promotive international entrepreneurship in emerging countries and can inform public policy accordingly.

State roles in platform governance: AI’s regulatory geographies

Platform governance scholarship commonly derives the role of the state from its actions as a regulator of platforms: a rule-setter that sets limits and restricts their activities. This article argues that three additional state roles enable and constrain the agency of states to regulate platforms: facilitator, buyer, and producer. Using the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act as a case study, the article asks: How do different state roles in platform governance shape AI’s regulatory geographies? It answers this research question by outlining two policy dilemmas between those four state roles. First, the EU’s ambition to act as a facilitator of digital markets constrains its scope of interventions as a regulator of platforms. Second, the EU’s deficits in acting as a producer of AI infrastructure exacerbate its dependency as a buyer of Big Tech offerings, especially cloud computing services. The article contends that dilemmas between state roles are not anomalies but defining features of state-platform relations. As generative AI systems gain sophistication, an understanding of how state roles relate to each other helps to navigate their complex governance regimes.

Big Tech, Competition Policy, and Strategic Management: An Alternative Perspective to Teece

Teece asserts that competition policy is so outdated that it now significantly degrades the ability of Big Tech firms to bring socially beneficial innovations to market. He suggests that strategic management research is essential in the struggle to update such policies. We counter that none of these assertions are accurate, let alone backed by evidence. While the larger goal of improving laws and policies through scientific research is a worthy one, the specific focus on doing so to aid a set of powerful firms that have allegedly caused—directly or indirectly—great societal damage is quite unappealing. To balance his pro-Big Tech perspective, we provide logical and theory-based arguments and evidence that indicates Big Tech has often been bad for innovation and society while their regulation has been good, and that more oversight—specifically tailored to digital platforms—would be better. We then offer three alternative paths for us, as management scholars, to take that leverage our distinctive skills and that fulfill our ethical and professional mandates, in the pursuit of improving the strategic decisions and actions that policymakers and firms take.

Traveling technology and perverted logics: conceptualizing Palantir’s expansion into health as sphere transgression

ABSTRACT This paper contains a normative interpretation and critique of Palantir’s expansion into the health domain by using the conceptual lens of ‘sphere transgressions’. The technology company, known for its activities in the sphere of security, expanded into the health domain during the pandemic, providing software to monitor the spread of Covid-19. In 2019 Palantir was severely criticized by human rights organizations for its role in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration. Activists and politicians worry about Palantir’s move into health. However, critique is often limited to data protection. These concerns fail to grasp the risks and harms of this expansion. In this paper, I explore the risks of Palantir’s expansion into the health sphere using Sharon’s sphere transgressions framework as a conceptual lens and critical tool to understand and judge this move. We should anticipate the risks of no public returns, dominance, and new dependencies. While this might be true for many Big Tech actors, I add that Palantir’s expansion might be particularly pernicious. Palantir’s history reveals the perversion of logics under exclusionary politics in the sphere of security. At the very least, this warrants special vigilance when importing their technologies into the sphere of health. I conclude that the sphere transgressions framework reveals risks beyond data protection regarding Palantir’s expansion into the health domain.

Machinic Visibility in Platform Discourses: Ubiquitous Interfaces for Precarious Users

Ubiquitous interfaces are becoming a key element in the promotional materials of tech companies. These new interfaces, normally associated with AR and VR systems, promise a future of frictionless technological interaction, allowing users to access any information and service from anywhere. Both factual and fictional, these systems are shown to enrich their users’ lives through machinic modes of vision and visualisation. In this paper, we frame promotional materials as elements in the discourses of Big Tech corporations that serve a strategic role in the expansion of their digital platforms. We analyse the symbolic role played by ubiquitous interfaces in the promotion of three digital platform services: Amazon’s Alexa Together, Microsoft’s Azure and Meta’s Metaverse. We claim that narratives of sensorial enrichment and empowerment—allowing people to not only see more, but better—are key in normalising the presence of platform interfaces in users’ lives. However, these narratives also advance what we call a regime of machinic visibility: a dependency of human vision on data processes and their visualisation. The imagined user of these services is a precarious one, unable to function or ‘see’ properly without a platform’s digital infrastructure. This precarity then justifies a relationship of dependence: the companies frame their products not just as enhancements, but as vital components of everyday life, implying that life itself is untenable without the intervention of platform companies. At the same time, Big Tech eschews criticism of its own role in undermining the social infrastructures and networks on which people depend.

Building synthetic worlds: lessons from the excessive infatuation and oversold disillusionment with the metaverse

ABSTRACT The metaverse comprises a range of technologies offering shared digital experiences based on immersive virtual worlds or decentralised economies. Brands, Big Tech, and investors made huge investments in the metaverse, but users did not share their excitement and the bubble duly burst. We explore this story by drawing on a wide range of data sources and first-hand knowledge. We consider the metaverse as a set of overlapping, partly competing ecosystems and expand the lens of industry architecture to Ecosystem Architecture to examine the rules, roles, and responsibilities involved. We find that incumbent firms rushed to embrace the metaverse in the hope of pre-empting disruption and safeguarding their competitive position, leading to over-investment. Greed among ecosystem orchestrators impeded contributors from creating value, while persistent technological shortcomings impaired the user experience. Our study throws new light on the dynamics of innovation and technology hypes and the challenges involved in cultivating and coordinating ecosystems.

Transitions in education: Educators, digitalisation, and datafication

This paper explores educators' experiences of the digitalisation and datafication of teaching and learning that intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on the transitions, responses, and agency of educators as the rules of their professional world changed. The paper uses data from four focus group discussions with 19 educators from diverse South African contexts including urban and rural, affluent and poor environments, schools, colleges, and universities. Framed by Archer's (2007, 2012) nuanced concepts of agency, the paper shows how educators working within the structures of very stratified education contexts negotiated their educational projects while the rules were being rewritten as the socio-technical systems in which they taught were-and are-being transformed in ways that are not yet fully understood. Control of the teaching and learning environment has been a key issue as it has become clear how much is outside the jurisdiction of individual educators: the entrenching of big tech in education, stakeholder arrangements including private-state partnerships, and the selection of digital tools and systems. Despite not being explicitly aware of the business models that shape the datafication of their teaching systems, educators discussed their discomfort and unease- while remaining reflexive and active agents showing the ability to reorientate a course of action even within narrow and covert parameters.

Human values in a digital ageWe, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age Wendy H. Wong MIT Press, 2023. 280 pp.

Big Tech must center human rights in data decisions, argues a political scientist.

Incidental governmentality: Big tech and the hidden rationalities of government

This paper proposes and explores the idea of incidental governmentality. We argue that incidental governmentality offers a creative context to critically scrutinise the changing rationalities of government in the age of Big Tech and digital surveillance. Incidental governmentality exhibits the same pastoral character as biopolitics: as governmental power is realised through the provision of life affirming public goods and services including improved public health, financial security, and social connection. However, incidental governmentality is incidental to the extent that its governmental reasons are secondary to that of its corporate rationalities. This paper charts the historical origins of incidental forms governmentality and the value of applying this theoretical perspective to emerging governmental forms. Analysis outlines the nature and critical implications of incidental forms of governmentality and draws out its distinctions with corporate governmentality, corporate social responsibility, and algorithmic governmentality. This paper utilises the idea of incidental governmentality to make sense of the “governmental” interventions of Big-Tech companies such as Facebook and Google in response to COVID-19 in the UK. Through this case study analysis considers the processes that enabled the rapid mobilisation of Big Tech within public health initiatives and what this can tell us about the political and geographical implications of incidental governmentality.