The Problem

The monopolization of the search engine industry allows a single corporation to influence what we access and act as a gatekeeper to the world's information

Utilizing Big Tech's platforms comes at both a personal and systemic cost. Consumers are fundamentally deceived and tend to believe the results are neutral and listed according to their relevance.

Increasingly, however, this is not the case, as Google has been guilty of promoting its own services over its competitors. Between 2017 and 2018, the European Union fined Google three times, for a total of €8.3 billion. The first of those fines, €2.4 billion in June 2017, was issued because Google used its dominance in search to boost its comparison-shopping service. This harms both consumers, by not providing them with the most relevant information available, as well as the economy, by stifling the benefits of an egalitarian-based free market.

Big Tech's surveillance-based business model is inherently incompatible with peoples' right to privacy and poses a threat to a range of other rights, including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and self-determination. Big Tech's centralization of control of the search engine industry is an innate threat to our right to free access to impartial, unmanipulated information. The infringements on our privacy through ubiquitous surveillance of our online activity to commoditize us has now revealed the Faustian arrangement we made over the past two decades and has allowed Google to execute a strategy of branding convenience to normalize its monopoly.

Big Tech's oligopoly looms large over society and casts a withering shadow over the former fields of innovation from which they first grew.

While true that companies like Facebook and Google have allocated their resources in truly ground-breaking and innovative ways, over the years, the areas of their innovation have come to serve few purposes other than those which serve to increase user consumption and engagement to further commoditise our actions. In addition, Google's predatory levels of competitive assimilation has seen 253 acquisitions of competing businesses and technology, further decreasing the overall potential for innovation by suppressing future competition in a Machiavellian approach to maintain their consolidated position of power.

It seems that society and governments' toleration of these practices is quickly approaching a watershed moment. The resulting status quo, which has existed in absolute terms for almost a generation, is now suddenly seen as vulnerable due to a tectonic shift in society and governments' willingness to abide by their continued station of influence. Anti-trust lawsuits tabled in early 2022 through the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission submitted as the American Innovation, and Choice Online Act (S.2992) & American Choice and Innovation Online Act (H.R.3816) include provisions that carry existential implications for the largest tech firms operating in the US and EU. The legislation has enjoyed broad bipartisan support.

Some of the provisions included in the legislation will prohibit Tech companies with a valuation of over $500 Billion from:

• "Self-preferencing" their products at the expense of competitors

• Intentionally disadvantaging other firms' products or services

• Using non-public data generated by a business user to advantage the covered platform's own products

• Interfering with pricing decisions set by another business user

• A moratorium on a merger between any Technology companies with a $500B market cap

The far-reaching implications and destabilising consequences contained within the provisions of those two acts would effectively make Big Tech into a metaphorical modern-day tower of Babel. The growing awareness of big tech's' actions and the eventual enactment of legislation in the US, EU and elsewhere will serve to supercharge Timpi's already demonstrated potential to scale.