The Big Tech Problem

Scale dehumanises. As Stalin said "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic". Most Big Tech companies have simply dissolved their customer support. As an individual or even as a fair sized company you have no import, efficacy or recourse. You are invisible and irrelevant.

Scale elicits mediocrity. While supposedly "innovative" Big Tech mostly copies (by bullying and buying-up small, genuinely innovative firms) and it mostly yields a bell curve of nominal and normative products safe enough to appeal to the 68 percent of "one sigma" customers.

Scale creates waste. The famous [Google Graveyard] catalogues a bonfire of human wealth, collectively billions of hours invested in learning and using products frivolously dropped at a whim. By contrast, most FOSS products are designed with longevity in mind. Some are over 40 years old and still maintained and running strong.

Scale harms the environment. Massive data-centres are draining energy and water supplies from civic society. The microprocessors built by companies like NVIDA cannot be repurposed and so contribute to e-waste and pollution while depleting rare mineral resources.

Because monopolies have no serious competitors they are free to break standards, buy laws to stymie adversarial interoperability and dictate the rules of digital engagement.

Choice is no better under duopolies or even markets comprising a few giant companies operating cartel-like conditions. They write their own social rules by unelected corporate collusion. Despite [differing] slants on anti-trust, Big Tech now clearly violates the wider interests of society, global well-being and [humane scientific advancement].

"Too big to fail" was the fundamental cause of the 2008 global crash by which public money was used to prop up a failing financial system. The evident "AI" bubble similarly threatens global economies in 2026.

We will all pay for it! This makes Big Tech a source of huge financial insecurity. Public money has always supplemented private investment in US Big Tech via bodies like [InQTel] and [NSF] funding channels. It is dishonest of these companies to present themselves as self-made commercial operations that have grown on their merits and business sense. We bail out their mistakes (like "AI").

Instead, put your money into FOSS for the long term economic security.

Big Tech companies are not what they advertise. The public perception of friendly consumer digital services is warped.

For example; Google state their mission as "to organise the world's information" whereas in reality it is to "collect the world's information". This may seem a subtle distinction, but acting as a giant private intelligence agency bigger than the CIA is not the same as being the world's local library.

Facebook claim to be a "social network" but have done grave harm to society and to social relations between people. Nothing so large and manipulative can have any benefit to humanity.

The collective value of companies like Apple and Microsoft exceed the GDP of most countries, placing Big Tech as the world's third economic superpower. NVIDIA alone dwarfs the rest of the world's military spending.

Smaller companies with tight margins must spend carefully. Having amassed trillions of dollars Big Tech companies have a war chest to buy up competition, buy more laws, bribe organisations and judges, produce propaganda, manipulate media, attack critics, hoard and selectively enforce patents.

Through sheer financial power Big Tech may act illegally with effective impunity. Paying off enormous fines levied under international law is simply the cost of doing what they like.

Whether it's GCHQ relying on [Amazon Cloud] to store sensitive UK data or [corrupt] 'partnerships' at the heart of UK digital services, governments around the world are too comfortably proximate to Big Tech.

This is a serious concern to all of us who understand the delicacy of national security in a rapidly changing world and the necessity of digital sovereignty. Because Big Tech [threatens democracy] its clear separation from government is as vital as the separation of Church and State is to liberal secular society.

Enough is enough. The European Commission has started the ball rolling on a major overhaul of policy and funding, with its call for evidence on a [European Open Digital Ecosystem].

When it comes to financial legibility, you as an individual can't even buy an ice-cream without the government demanding to know, and your bank tattling on you. But Big Tech uses financial and legal trickery to effect a "Romulan cloaking device". Journalists and regulatory enforcers are kept locked out. Big Tech hides its code and strategy.

For example; Android is ostensibly Linux, but in reality is opaque, proprietary code, carefully guarded so you don't know what it's really doing. Apple built their operating system from public BSD code, but now use egregious laws like the US DMCA to wrap it in secrecy.

Big Tech uses intellectual property law (trademarks, copyright and patents) to restrict freedom and avoid paying back what is due. Meanwhile, in an act of face-slapping hypocrisy, almost everything Big Tech makes is built from Free Open Source Software, taken from the people, from millions of volunteer coders around the globe who work for little or nothing.

Through outdated and unfair trade pressure they've thwarted interoperability, standards and competition. This moral asymmetry beggars belief.

With Trump's tariffs and contempt for old allies, a new era of trade relations frees us to innovate again in Europe.

Much of the code written by Big Tech is awful. It is partly because of speed of development, poorly managed and reckless software engineering that is leading to a massive [crisis of software quality] noted by expert luminaries like [Ian Sommerville ]. Microsoft averages as much as one bug per 100 lines of code versus an average of one per thousand in typical open source measurements.

They're also supplanting provable code and formal methods with probabilistic "AI", This leads us all toward systems that are indeterminate and non-reproducible.

There is ample evidence of Big Tech vendors shipping products with malware pre-installed and of deliberate backdoors in critical infrastructure software. The famous [probable Windows backdoor] since 1999, multiple [CISCO backdoors] and the [MS routing scandal] are just a few.

Since Big Tech code is subscripton based it is licensed, usually on a monthly basis, and updated in situ without your oversight. The programs running on your computers are therefore whatever Big Tech companies says, which not only includes modifying or disabling critical features, but also introducing spyware and other malware. You may not have backdoors in your system today, but you are one Cloudstrike or SolarWinds event from being compromised tomorrow.

The only thing separating this behaviour from criminial intrusion under the Computer Misuse Act, is your tenuous permission in choosing such products.