Advertising
Supported by
While lawmakers ask if Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are monopolies, a journalist remembers her attempt to interact with companies.
By Kashmir Hill
Executives from Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple were called in a House antitrust committee this week to answer questions about whether they have too much force and whether it harms consumers.
The technology chiefs, who gave the impression through a video conference, rejected questions about being “cyber-barons,” saying that they had many festivals and that consumers had other features to offer.
But them? Last year, to see how much we have these companies, I conducted an experiment for the news of the Gizmodo generation to see how difficult it would be to get them out of my life.
It’s been easy. From my years of writing about virtual privacy, I knew those corporations were at the heart of many of our online interactions. I worked with a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra, who designed for me a traditional tool, a virtual personal network that prevented my devices from sending or receiving knowledge from tech giants by blocking the millions of Internet addresses controlled through corporations.
Then I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, one by one, and all at once, for six weeks. Amazon and Google went through the hardest-to-avoid corporations.
Separating Amazon from my life meant losing access to any site hosted through Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud service provider on the Internet. Many applications and much of the Internet use Amazon servers to host their virtual content, and much of the virtual virtual virtual world has become inaccessible when I said goodbye to Amazon, adding Amazon Prime Video Netflix to the competition.
Amazon is also hard to avoid in the genuine world. When I ordered a phone holder for my eBay car, it came in The Amazon signature packaging because the dealer used “Compliance through Amazon”, paying the company to purchase and ship their product.
When I blocked Google, the total Internet slowed down for me, because almost every single site I visited used Google to supply their sources, run their ads, track their users or whether their users were human or robots. When Google was blocked, I couldn’t connect to the Dropbox knowledge service because the idea of the site wasn’t a genuine person. Uber and Lyft stopped running for me because they relied on Google Maps to navigate the world. I discovered that Google Maps had a de facto monopoly on online maps. Even Google’s lifelong reviewer, Yelp, used it to tell PC users where to locate businesses.
I came to Amazon and Google as providers of the Internet infrastructure itself, so embedded in the architecture of the virtual world that even its competence had to depend on its services.
Facebook, Apple and Microsoft came here with their own challenges. While Facebook is less debilitating to block, I extraordinarily missed Instagram (which owns Facebook) and stopped receiving news from my social circle, such as the birth of the son of a smart friend. “I guess if I post something on Facebook, everyone will know,” she told me when I called her weeks later to congratulate her. I tried a choice called Mastodon, but a social network without any of your friends is not very funny.
It was hard to leave Apple because I had two Apple computers and an iPhone, so I ended up buying radically new hardware to continue accessing the Internet and making phone calls.
Apple and Google’s Android software has a duopoly in the smartphone market. Looking forward to any of the companies, I ended up getting a stupid phone phone, a Nokia 3310 in which I had to relearn the art of texting on the phone’s virtual keys, and a computer with an operational Linux formula from a company called Purism that tries to create “a moral computation environment,” especially by assisting its users from tech giants.
Yes, there are opportunities for products and they are presented through tech giants, but they are harder to locate and use.
Microsoft, which is at the antitrust highlight this time but knows how it feels, has been easy to block at the customer level. As my colleague Steve Lohr is, Microsoft is “primarily a generation provider for advertising customers” those days.
But, like Amazon, Microsoft has a cloud service, so some sites are dark to me, as do two Microsoft-owned installations that I use frequently, LinkedIn and Skype. Not being able to use the facilities of a tech giant I love was a threat to this experience: as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, tech giants have bought more than 400 corporations and start-ups over the decade that followed.
Critics of large generation corporations are occasionally told, “If you don’t like the company, don’t use your products.” What I’m getting away with is that it’s not imaginable to do that. It’s not just about products and facilities named after the wonderful tech giant. It’s just that these corporations control a thicket of darker products and installations that are hard to get to the bottom of the team on which we depend on everything we do, from paintings to moving from point A to point B.
Many other people have called what I’ve done “digital veganism.” Digital vegans planned the hardware and software they use and the knowledge they consume and share, because data is power, and more and more corporations seem to have it all.
There have been two other types of reactions to the story. Some other people have said this is a sign of how important these corporations are to the U.S. economy. Others, such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat and member of the House Antitrust Committee, said at the time that the revelation was evidence of their monopoly power.
“By virtue of controlling essential infrastructure, these companies appear to have the ability to control access to markets,” Mr. Nadler said. “In some basic ways, the problem is not unlike what we faced 130 years ago, when railroads transformed American life — both enabling farmers and producers to access new markets, but also creating a key chokehold that the railroad monopolies could exploit.”
If I was still blocking tech giants today, I wouldn’t have been watching this week’s antitrust hearing online. C-SPAN distributed it online through Google-owned YouTube.
Once the experiment was over, I started using the corporate facilities again, because as has been demonstrated, I had no choice.
Advertising