Essay about The Big Five Tech Companies

📌Category: Business, Corporation, Science, Technology
📌Words: 884
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 13 June 2021

The Big Five refers to the biggest companies in tech today and are based in the United States. There are arguments that they are too big and can negatively take advantage of this power. These five companies are Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Jones, 2019). The idea of breaking them up is a move which has gained popularity over the years but it does not mean that this will be possible, easy, or the right thing which needs to be done. The calls to break them up come from all sides of politics and there are also those in economic circles who feel the same. The five giants have been accused of having too much power over the society, democracy, and the economy (Jones, 2019). Breaking the big five is not easy and it is not necessary the right thing to do to achieve the results of making the market fair. 

There are several stakeholders around the world who are concerned about the volume of data which these companies have and the way they can sway the lives of people. A platform such as Facebook has an estimated 2.4 billion active users monthly (Frank, 2020). Google by Alphabet, on the other hand, gets more than 92 percent of search engine inquiries. These concerns are there but breaking up these companies is not necessarily a legal thing. The antitrust laws which are there in the United States are there to deal with monopolies and cartels in the market. The antitrust laws were passed, however, when the majority of the technology today did not exist. These companies need to have violated the laws in ways in which the right remedy would have been to have them broken up. The information available shows that these companies have not broken the various antitrust laws in their operations. Breaking them up can be a political move and can end up hurting innovation. A company can only be found guilty of monopolization if they attained the monopoly through means other than providing the better product at better prices. A platform such as Google has grown its popularity by becoming the best search engine yielding useful information to their people (Frank, 2020). The solution to the problem of the big five would be stopping them becoming this big in the first place. It is better to investigate these big tech mergers before they even take place. One of the instances which could have been investigated is when Facebook acquired both Instagram and Whatsapp. There should have been a harder look at the mergers so that companies do not turn into monopolies. The antitrust agencies should be given more resources so that they can investigate the mergers before they take place. Breaking them up now is not necessarily legal. 

There are those who feel that big tech needs to be broken up. There are those who have concerns especially the politicians that big tech is too powerful. These have become powerful and dominant platforms which are hard for any other person to compete against. The small organizations in the industry have no chance competing against these huge businesses (Chang, 2019). The network effects are the main reason why these organizations remain this powerful. The antitrust laws currently are not suited to handle this issue. There is the argument that they can exploit this power to even take down governments. There are those who have attribute revolutions to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Frank, 2020). It is important to fix the market and establish new rules and laws which can promote competition in the industry. To counter this argument, there are those who say that innovation is at the core of industry in the United States. The solution to these issues of power will be solved by the same market that created them. Years ago the natural monopoly was with Yahoo and MySpace but today there are other companies. They may look like unstoppable giants but something innovative and new will always come about and revolutionize the entire industry. 

There are people who bring on the argument that the big technology companies and their size is not a problem but a benefit to consumers. One of the benefits that have been cited going by their size is the amount of research and development that they have invested in. the size which they have has enabled them to make big investments for the future for the benefit of the world. Breaking them up would mean losing all of the investment which goes into creating the technology of the future (Frank, 2020). There has also been the argument that these industries can only exist when there is just one big company. There is no one who would want to be in five Facebook-like communities. One company is enough and serves the purpose for all individuals. They work better when people can come together in one platform. 

In conclusion, breaking up big tech can be a trendy topic for the world today but it is not necessary or possible. There is the absence of agreement on the topic as others argue that they hold too much power that they can exploit. They have also been accused of using their power and monopoly to fight smaller companies but these are not founded in a free economy. It is a political conversation but it needs to be one that looks at the benefits of these companies. These companies in the world today contribute to research and development which leads to new innovations every year. There is no other bigger investor in research and development in technology compared to these companies. Breaking them up is not a solution but there should be better and modern laws to deal with the industry.

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