Who Controls Technology?
The Invisible Landlords of the Digital World
A handful of companies now control the pipes, the platforms, and the rules of nearly every digital interaction on earth — and most of us agreed to it without noticing.
The Idea
There is a concept in economics called a 'platform monopoly' — a business that doesn't just compete in a market but becomes the market itself. What makes this different from old-fashioned monopoly power is subtlety. Standard Oil controlled oil. These companies control the conditions under which everyone else operates. They set the terms, take a cut, and can change the rules mid-game. Consider the structure: a small number of corporations now own the dominant app stores, the dominant cloud infrastructure, the dominant advertising networks, and the dominant social graphs. These aren't just businesses — they are, in a meaningful sense, private governments. They have constitutions (terms of service), taxation systems (platform fees, typically 15–30% of every transaction), and the power to banish citizens (account suspension, de-platforming). What they lack is democratic accountability. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson coined the phrase 'private government' for employers who exercise near-total control over workers' lives. The same logic scales up. When a company can unilaterally decide which apps exist, which voices are amplified, and which businesses survive, that's not just market power — it's governance. The unsettling part isn't that these companies are malicious. It's that the architecture of power was built so gradually, and so conveniently, that we invited it in ourselves.
In the World
In 2020, Apple removed Fortnite — one of the most popular games in the world, with hundreds of millions of players — from the App Store overnight. Epic Games had tried to bypass Apple's payment system, taking a smaller cut for itself. Apple's response was immediate and total: Fortnite vanished from every iPhone and iPad on the planet. Hundreds of millions of players lost access to a product they had already paid for, in some cases substantially. What followed was a lawsuit that laid bare an uncomfortable reality. Apple argued it was simply enforcing its own rules on its own platform. Epic argued those rules were the rules of a monopolist. The court largely sided with Apple on the monopoly question — but the episode revealed something more interesting than the legal outcome. Here was a company with a market capitalisation larger than the GDP of most countries, able to erase a competitor's product from the pockets of hundreds of millions of people with a single internal decision — no court order, no regulatory approval, no appeal process that moved at anything like human speed. Tim Sweeney, Epic's CEO, had gone to war with a landlord who also owned the only road into town. He lost. But the fight made visible what had previously been invisible: that using a smartphone means living inside someone else's jurisdiction, on terms that can change whenever they like.
Why It Matters
This isn't an abstract concern about corporate ethics. It shapes what tools you have access to, what you pay for them, and whose values are quietly embedded in your daily life. When a platform decides what content its algorithm amplifies, it is making editorial choices that affect public conversation — without the accountability of a newspaper editor or a broadcaster. When it decides which businesses can trade on its marketplace, it is performing a function once reserved for regulators. When it controls the hardware, the operating system, the app store, and the payment layer all at once, there is no meaningful exit. The question worth sitting with isn't whether these companies are good or bad actors. Most people who work at them are trying to build useful things. The question is structural: what happens when private infrastructure becomes so essential that opting out is no longer a real choice? Electricity became a regulated utility precisely because we recognised that some things are too foundational to leave entirely to market logic. We are, slowly and awkwardly, beginning to have that conversation about digital infrastructure — and the outcome will shape what the internet looks and feels like for the next generation.
A Question to Ponder
If the platforms you use every day suddenly changed their terms in a way you found genuinely harmful — to your business, your community, or your values — what would your actual alternatives be?
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