12 Facts About Big Tech

Big Tech, known as the Tech Giants, Big Four, or Big Five, is a name given to the four or five most dominant companies in the information technology industry of the United States.

Big Tech giants are dominant players in their respective areas of technology: artificial intelligence, e-commerce, online advertising, consumer electronics, cloud computing, computer software, media streaming, smart home, self-driving cars, and social networking.

Big Tech companies have been criticized for creating a new economic order called surveillance capitalism.

Concept of Big Tech is analogous to the consolidation of market dominance by a few companies in other market sectors such as "Big Oil" and "Big Media".

The use of "Big Tech" was similar to how the largest oil companies were grouped under Big Oil following the 1970s energy crisis, or how the major cigarette producers were grouped as Big Tobacco as Congress began seeking regulation on that industry.

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Term Big Tech is often broken down into more specific sub-groupings, often referred to by the following names or acronyms.

Twitter being categorized as Big Tech has featured in political debates and economic commentary due to perceived political and social influence of the platform.

Big Tech argued that the promotion of technology convergence by people such as Nicholas Negroponte made it appear credible and desirable for the Internet to evolve into an oligopoly.

Major contributing factor towards the growth of Big Tech is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed into law in 1996.

Big Tech operating in digital markets and being inherently focused on technology mean that Big Tech is more likely to focus on innovation than other groups of large industry dominating corporations before them.

Big Tech discussed horizontal concentration of power, in which diverse services such as email, instant messaging, online searching, downloading and streaming are combined internally within any of the GAMA members.

Big Tech has argued that the current situation is the result of economic deregulation, globalization, and the failure of politicians to understand and respond to developments in technology.