Is Big Tech getting too big?

The EU's attempts to challenge Big Tech's dominance continue as the world reckons with an AI revolution that will see Big Tech get even bigger. 

The bloc has a "long history" of moving "aggressively" in regulating tech giants and halting any attempts at "abusing" their "market power", said Yahoo Finance. In its latest move, the European Commission (EC) has hit Microsoft with an "antitrust charge", accusing the US company of "illegally bundling" or "tying" its Teams app into its other software packages. The EC said the Teams app had been given an "undue advantage" by being tied in with the Office and Microsoft 365 packages, "harming rivals such as Slack and Zoom", said the Financial Times (FT).

The charges represent a "landmark case" and are some of the biggest ever brought against Microsoft. It came just a day after the EU presented similar charges to Apple, and demonstrates how Brussels is gradually "turning up the heat on US tech giants".

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What did the commentators say?

The EU has been eager to be seen to be monitoring the big US tech firms after "years of complaints from start-ups and campaigners" that regulators have reacted too slowly in pushing back on "anti-competitive behaviour", said Javier Espinoza at the FT. The 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA) now requires Big Tech to "run their platforms fairly or face hefty fines", and Brussels is already in proceedings against Meta and Alphabet (parent company of Google) for anti-competitive behaviour.

Big Tech, of course, is pushing back. The punishments are likely to be long delayed with the companies "expected to put up a fight" in EU courts, while European consumers may experience delays in new releases. 

Apple has already chosen to "delay the rollout" of three new artificial intelligence features until 2025, citing the DMA as "the reason", said Mizy Clifton at Semafor. This creates a dilemma for the EU, as its regulation is "forcing tech giants" to "create more user-focused and privacy-aware products" but could lead to Europe "falling behind in the global push for AI technology".

Microsoft has also come under scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in the US for its "dealings" with startup Inflection AI, which may also contravene antitrust laws, said Mark Lemley and Matt Wansley in The New York Times. Microsoft has "defended" its deal, but it has raised questions about whether the Big Tech firms are now too big to allow new companies to flourish, forgetting that "it is competition – not consolidation – that delivers technological progress".

Indeed, the Big Tech firms were "once small start-ups themselves", added Lemley and Wansley, but they are now "old", and instead of "innovating", they have "learned to stop the cycle of disruption". They do this by investing in start-ups, giving them "intelligence about competitive threats and the ability to influence the start-ups’ direction".

While there have been "competition issues in the Big Tech sector", agreed Andrew Lilico in The Telegraph, the Big Tech firms have been an "important driver of recent US economic growth" and overreaching with regulation could "kill the golden goose". Specific cases of anti-competitive behaviour should be investigated, he argued, but it is wrong to assume Big Tech firms are "automatically monopolists by their nature".

What next?

The focus for all the Big Tech firms is generative AI, which will undoubtedly be the "big technological upheaval" of the near future, said The Economist. But regulators need to strike a delicate balance when monitoring the firms' interests in AI, and a "light touch" may be necessary. However, Big Tech would surely "use their imperial might to try to bend it to their advantage" if they were left "to their own devices", so regulators must "move fast" and act on their "duty" to "prevent them quashing competition".

Perhaps "be careful what you wish for" when attempting to heavily regulate Big Tech, warned Alex Hern at The Guardian. While the size of these companies may make them seem "unassailable" right now, they "might not be on top for ever", he added, and "there’s no guarantee we’ll love what replaces them".