It’s Getting Real (Premium)

Back in October, I described the sudden attention Big Tech was getting from governments and regulators as breathtaking. And it is that. But so, too, is an incoming tsunami wave or a meteor streaking towards the earth. As we careen into mid-2025, we're starting to see what a regulated Big Tech might look like. And it's as scary as it is thrilling. And overdue.

And that's the problem. We've been living under the yoke of Big Tech for so long that we've collectively forgotten that it could be--should be--different. Human beings are adaptable, but it's a sad commentary on the current state of personal technology that living with Big Tech is edging ever closer to the living with cancer side of the spectrum. It's something with deal with, ignoring the bad while rationalizing the functionality we get in return.

One of my earliest observations about Microsoft, lost to time but likely in the early 1990s, was that its customers misunderstood the relationships they had with the company. You pay this company for its products, I argued. You have a right to expect certain levels of quality and functionality. And you should not be shy about providing feedback when a product you pay for doesn't meet your needs.

This warning went largely unheeded at the time. But today, things are a bit more nuanced. We still pay for personal technology products and services, even those that are ostensibly free. But our expectations are dramatically lower, with many rationalizing that the privacy invasion they never explicitly agreed to is fair compensation for the functionality we get, whether its free services like Gmail and Google Maps or expensive, paid products like Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud. We use the term enshittification to describe something terrible because that term is both perfect and instantly recognizable as true. But the unspoken nuance there is that enshittification doesn't happen suddenly and without warning. It happens slowly, over time, and we're the frogs that don't realize we're being cooked until it's too late.

We need to be smarter consumers. And we need to be smarter citizens. We get caught up in silly, misunderstood terms like socialism and over-regulation but ignore the fact that the fundamental purpose of government is to protect its citizens. And one of the many ways in which governments can protect us is to shield us from rapacious companies that put ignore laws--not to mention ethics and common sense--so that they can grow unfettered, harming competition, partners, and customers alike. And on that note, Big Tech cannot be regulated enough.

But Big Tech has not been regulated at all. Not since the Microsoft antitrust trials of the late 1990s and early 2000s, incidents that today seem so tame and so minor in the face of the problems we have today. But it's finally happening. In the EU most aggressively, but now, too, finally and belatedly, in the United States. And elsewhere, of course. But when antitrust action occurs...