A Digital Tech New Deal to break up Big Tech

In July, the CEOs of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon appeared before Congress in an “historic” antitrust hearing. The event was met with great fanfare from the press. In early October, the United States House Judiciary Committee published a 450-page report criticising the anti-competitive business practices of the four giants and recommending new measures to “restore competition” to the market.

Mainstream “tech critics” across the political spectrum of the so-called “techlash” are celebrating this antitrust agenda led by the US Congress and the intellectuals informing the hearings. They see nothing wrong with the American legal system reshaping corporations that dominate markets outside US borders. After all, they accept the notion that the US “owns” the world and see capitalism as the only system imaginable.

For them, the reformist goal to “restore” a “capitalism for the people” is seen as the proper way to fix Big Tech. The Americans are joined by European power elites, who are seeking to curb the dominance of Big Tech as part of an effort to increase market share for European companies.

Yet the solution to American Big Tech corporations dominating markets across the world cannot come from the American or European pro-capital legal systems. Rather, it has to be a collective effort by the international community, focused on bottom-first redistribution for the Global South, as part of a global transformation towards a sustainable green economy.

The new progressives and neo-Brandeisian antitrust

To understand Big Tech antitrust in the US, we need to understand its origins. The movement was spearheaded by a group of US legal scholars, sometimes called the neo-Brandeisians, named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941).

As a young lawyer and legal scholar, Brandeis focused on social justice issues and financial power. As corporations restricted competition through “trusts”, he became concerned with how monopoly power could undermine democracy and harm society. His work inspired “antitrust” legislation banning unfair business practices in the US.

Decades later, in the 1970s, a conservative group of legal scholars sought to restrict the scope of antitrust in the US. These neoliberals of the Chicago School, led by legal scholar Robert Bork, argued that antitrust should be narrowly concerned with economic efficiency, largely measured by lower prices for consumers. Inspired by the likes of Bork, US courts began ruling that “consumer welfare”, rather than broad concerns about democracy and power, should be the focus of antitrust.

Over the past few years, neo-Brandeisian scholars dug into legal history and argued, correctly, that the neoliberal antitrust framework does not work for Big Tech. Its business model cannot always be measured by the price that consumers pay for a firm’s product (eg Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are “free”), and broader concerns around democracy and equality should inform antitrust. In order to fix Big Tech, they insist, we need to think broadly about antitrust and antimonopoly, much like Louis Brandeis did a century ago.

While this all sounds great, a closer look at what neo-Brandesians offer reveals two significant problems with it: one, they want the US to legislate for a problem that concerns the whole world; two, they still insist on a capitalist solution which is incompatible with notions of global social justice and environmental protection.

Big Tech is global

Neo-Brandeisian scholars intend to restructure Big Tech within a framework of US law, spearheaded by US thinkers. However, the firms they want to regulate have a global reach that harms people outside of the US as well.

In fact, the central business model of Big Tech is digital colonialism. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft (GAFAM) are worth more than $5 trillion in total and much of it is profit coming from abroad.

For example, less than half of Facebook’s revenues come from the US and Canada, while nine of its top 10 user bases are from Global South countries, totalling 957 million users. The US, by comparison, has 190 million users.

Most revenue for Apple and Google comes from outside the US as well, and almost half of Microsoft’s revenue comes from abroad. A large majority of Amazon’s total revenue comes from its US operations, but it is expanding globally, and its Amazon Web Services dominate the global cloud market.

If we zoom in on individual countries, the scale of the problem becomes even clearer. A small country may provide a tiny fraction of GAFAM’s revenue, but the giants still capture a large share of various markets in that country. For example, in South Africa, Google controls 70 percent of local online advertising, and social media – led by Facebook – another 12 percent. South Africa’s largest media groups take just 8 percent of the pie.

Some 84 percent of smartphones in South Africa use Google Android operating systems, while 15 percent – Apple; 72 percent of desktop computers have Microsoft Windows, while 17 percent – Apple. Other products and services, such as e-hailing, streaming entertainment, search, cloud and office suites are also dominated by American firms. This dynamic repeats throughout the world.

US tech reformers have little to say about the global nature of US tech transnationals, or about why laws regulated by the US government should reshape the core structure of global behemoths. Most of them also no longer discuss how the partnership between the National Security Agency and Big Tech promotes American military imperial interests outside of the US.

The best neo-Brandeisian scholars can argue is that their proposals would weaken the stranglehold of the Silicon Valley beyond US borders. But this is not enough to resolve the problem and does nothing to address the looming environmental catastrophe we are facing.

‘Kinder capitalism’ does not work

US tech reformers assume that market competition – supplemented by new privacy laws, public utility regulation, and some publicly subsidised, non-profit alternatives – is the solution to the power of monopoly. However, they do not address the problem of how private property in a capitalist marketplace creates inequality in the first place. Would “competitive markets” really benefit the Global South?

Competition means beating other people out, and poorer people and nations are naturally disadvantaged in such a competition.

After “restoring competition” to the tech economy, those who will dominate as “new market entrants” on the “open” internet will still be companies from richer countries: the US, European powers, China, etc, not low-income countries like Zimbabwe, Bolivia or Cambodia. And within low-income countries, the well-resourced classes will capture any new market opportunities that an antitrust push in the US may open.

Indeed, reformers assume we can restore “competitive capitalism” while we are staring at the abyss of permanent environmental destruction. Proponents of capitalism maintain that we can grow our way to poverty alleviation and innovate to stop climate change and environmental degradation. But estimates show that under the growth model of the past few decades, the global economy would require a 175-fold increase in global consumption and production just to bring billions of poor people up to a meagre $5 per day. And in the process, we would most definitely destroy the environment.

Degrowth researchers have demonstrated that capitalism is fatally flawed. A capitalist economy focuses on profit and growth, which increases greenhouse gas emissions overheating the planet and leads to over-extraction of material resources, which results in ecological collapses.

The richest nations are dependent on material extraction from the poorest. High-income countries have the worst material footprint, with a consumption level of about 26 tonnes per person per year, when the sustainable level is about eight tonnes per person globally. Low-income countries consume about two tonnes per person per year.

The Big Tech industry contributes to environmental destruction in several ways. E-waste now accounts for five percent of all global waste, and it is growing, in large part because gadgets are built with short lifespans. Instead of designing products that can last a long time, Big Tech has lobbied to kill “right to repair” laws, which would allow consumers to get their devices repaired or buy spare parts from third parties.

What is more, Big Tech directly contributes to inequality by extracting wealth from the poor and concentrating in the hands of a few US-based executives, shareholders and highly paid professionals. At the same time, it exploits workers and often denies them safe and dignified working conditions.

Digital capitalists also encourage consumerism through ads and monetise surveillance, which is destroying privacy, with grave consequences for civil rights and liberties.

Private ownership of the means of computation – software code, infrastructure and the internet – is required to extract money for content, force ads on audiences and spy on users. If the people own and control the digital environment, they would opt to share knowledge freely, reject ads and protect their privacy.

Solutions: Tech for Extinction Rebellion

It goes without saying that any solution for the digital economy must be part and parcel of a sustainable green economy. This, in turn, requires rapid wealth and income redistribution and degrowth. It is a monumental task.

Fortunately, there are some reasonable ways forward.

First, we can phase out copyright paywalls and patents. Such a move would enjoy the support of activists in the Global South and Global North, and would make the world’s scientific and cultural knowledge available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay. Of course, equitable information sharing and generation also requires resources to bridge the digital divide and make use of scientific knowledge.

Second, software can be placed under strong free and open-source licences, online services can be decentralised, interoperable and owned by communities, while internet infrastructure can be fully socialised as communal property. The global Free Software Movement and activist scholars have already built a preliminary foundation and framework for moving in this direction.

Third, an eco-socialist Digital Tech New Deal has to be implemented to reorient the tech economy away from profit and towards satisfying the needs of the people. This requires socialising financial, intellectual and physical property. As first steps, we could impose heavy taxes on the rich to fund a global digital commons, produce plans to phase out private ownership of information and the means of computation, support workers and mandate economic redistribution to the global poor, and build a privacy-by-design tech ecosystem. All of this must be done within the confines of a sustainable economy.

These solutions need to be part of the global movement for wealth redistribution, reparations, and democratisation. In South Africa, we are building a People’s Tech for People’s Power movement to drive this agenda forward, through popular education and the formation of solidarity networks to launch actions against Big Tech and digital capitalism.

There already is a good historical precedent for global action against Big Tech. During South Africa’s apartheid era, people around the world initiated boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against corporations like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which aided and abetted the apartheid state and businesses.

US corporations, in response, pushed a reformist agenda called the Sullivan Principles said to improve racial equality for workers. But anti-apartheid activists rejected the move as corporate propaganda designed to manufacture consent while US corporations continued to profit from apartheid misery.

Today, the US resembles the South African apartheid state, but on a global scale. Its high-tech military projects power across the world, its diplomats impose strong intellectual property protections at the World Trade Organization, its imperialist anti-immigrant policies control the movement of people and capital, and its tech corporations dominate nearly every industry vertical outside of mainland China, all while creating a global police state.

We do not need 21st century Sullivan Principles to save digital capitalism. We need digital socialism, reparations and democratisation of tech for a global green economy. This is a matter of survival for the whole human race.

If the Americans cannot get on board with this, the rest of the world may have to unite behind targeted BDS actions centred on Silicon Valley and its supporters in the US.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.