GEAB 192

The fundamental principles of the Internet in 1995 included free access and technological democratisation. For the most part, the information highways launched at the time seemed to be offered to the public with a humanistic and humanitarian goal: universal access to knowledge. Then, in 2009, Big Tech began to take control of Web 2.0 (the era of social networks) and the souls that populated it[1]. Souls – and soon, above all, a growing share of the vast wealth generated worldwide by the deployment of these technologies.

States fund research and deployment, individual and corporate users generate value, but it is Big Tech that reaps the profits – in (growing) user fees, in capturing investment and even in subsidies under the CHIPS Act launched by President Biden in August 2022 (Intel, for example, received 7.9 billion dollars in state aid in November 2024).[2]

It’s easy to see why: Big Tech was given a blank cheque as part of the panic that legitimately gripped the West some fifteen years ago at the prospect of being overtaken technologically by China. How was an indebted West going to stay in the race? The private technology sector had the solution: channel a significant proportion of the financial flows towards it, with increasingly glittering promises of return on investment and increasingly dystopian promises of technological, social and economic breakthroughs, all backed up by a great deal of communication.