Big Tech – a dependency risk

Big Tech firms such as the so-called Big 5 – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Apple – have become omnipresent in daily life. Their global reach spans millions of users worldwide, they have access to Big Data and they are quasi-monopolistic.

Google is utilised for 91.5% of searches¹ and Google Chrome has a 64.4% share of the browsing market.² Apple’s iPhone has a market share of 27.1%,³ while Facebook and Instagram (owned by Meta) claim a 76% share of the social media market.⁴ Amazon dominates US e-commerce with a market share of 37.6%,⁵ and globally runs second only to Alibaba.⁶ Microsoft computers run 73% of desktop operating systems worldwide.⁷

Amazon, Microsoft and Google host critical business operations on their cloud services for many companies. Amazon Web Services is the leader with a 31% market share in the fourth quarter of 2023, followed by Azure (Microsoft, 24%) and Google Cloud (Alphabet, 11%).⁸ Technology research and consulting company Gartner has estimated that public cloud end-user spending in 2023 will reach nearly USD 600 billion, up 22% from the previous year.⁹

With the steady increase in use of cloud services provided by just a few Big Tech firms, the world economy and society face a dependency risk.

The services provided by Big Tech include search engines, browsers, smart phones, social media, e-commerce, software, hardware, operating systems, cloud services and most recently generative artificial intelligence, and these services are becoming increasingly interconnected. The main cloud service firms are building several layers of redundancy by separating infrastructure centres in various ways (eg, on the software side, physically and geographically). Nevertheless, occurrence of a disaster event due to human error,¹⁰ natural catastrophe or cyberattack, resulting in a long-running shutdown of services provided by different companies and the public sector is an ever-present risk.

In addition, in recent years, the technology industry overall and the Big 5 have been hitting the headlines due to concerns around the addictiveness of social media and other software services such as gaming, the political influence and polarisation that social media platforms can facilitate, and data privacy. For instance, social media has come under more scrutiny for allegedly undermining democracies and human rights, and for facilitating societal polarisation, this in turn leading to ethnic violence.

Given their global reach and influence, what will happen, and who will be accountable should one or more of the Big Tech companies fail?