Tech Giants Will Block Web Again
I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Incommunicable.
As lawmakers debate whether Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are monopolies, a reporter recalls her attempt to avoid interacting with the companies.
The main executives of Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple were called before a House antitrust commission this week, ostensibly to reply questions about whether they take too much power and whether that hurts consumers.
The tech bosses, who appeared via videoconference, fended off questions about existence "cyber barons," saying they have plenty of competition and that consumers accept other options for the services they offer.
But practise they? Terminal twelvemonth, in an try to sympathize only how dependent we are on these companies, I did an experiment for the tech news site Gizmodo to see how hard it would be to remove them from my life.
To exercise that wasn't easy. From my years writing well-nigh digital privacy, I knew these companies were in the background of many of our online interactions. I worked with a technologist named Dhruv Mehrotra, who designed a custom tool for me, a virtual private network that kept my devices from sending data to or receiving data from the tech giants by blocking the millions of cyberspace addresses the companies controlled.
Then I blocked Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, one by one — and and then all at once — over half-dozen weeks. Amazon and Google were the hardest companies to avoid by far.
Cut Amazon from my life meant losing access to any site hosted past Amazon Web Services, the internet'south largest cloud provider. Many apps and a large portion of the cyberspace use Amazon'southward servers to host their digital content, and much of the digital world became inaccessible when I said good day to Amazon, including the Amazon Prime number Video competitor Netflix.
Amazon was difficult to avoid in the real globe as well. When I ordered a phone holder for my car from eBay, information technology arrived in Amazon's signature packaging, because the seller used "Fulfillment by Amazon," paying the company to store and ship his product.
When I blocked Google, the unabridged internet slowed downwardly for me, because almost every site I visited was using Google to supply its fonts, run its ads, track its users, or determine if its users were humans or bots. While blocking Google, I couldn't sign into the data storage service Dropbox considering the site idea I wasn't a real person. Uber and Lyft stopped working for me, considering they were both dependent on Google Maps for navigating the world. I discovered that Google Maps had a de facto monopoly on online maps. Even Google's longtime critic Yelp used it to tell computer users where businesses could be constitute.
I came to retrieve of Amazon and Google as the providers of the very infrastructure of the internet, so embedded in the architecture of the digital world that fifty-fifty their competitors had to rely on their services.
Facebook, Apple and Microsoft came with their ain challenges. While Facebook was less debilitating to block, I missed Instagram (which Facebook owns) terribly, and I stopped getting news from my social circle, similar the nascency of a practiced friend'south kid. "I but presume that if I mail something on Facebook, everyone will know near it," she told me when I chosen her weeks later to congratulate her. I tried out an alternative called Mastodon, only a social network devoid of whatever of your friends isn't much fun.
Apple tree was hard to go out because I had ii Apple computers and an iPhone, so I wound up getting some radical new hardware in gild to keep accessing the net and making phone calls.
Apple and Google's Android software take a duopoly on the smartphone market. Wanting to avoid both companies, I wound upwards getting a impaired phone — a Nokia 3310 on which I had to relearn the fine art of texting on numerical phone keys — and a laptop with a Linux operating arrangement from a company chosen Purism that is trying to create "an upstanding computing environment," namely by helping its users avoid the tech giants.
Image
Yep, at that place are alternatives for products and services offered by the tech giants, only they are harder to find and to use.
Microsoft, which is not in the antitrust hot seat this time around but knows what it feels like, was easy to block on the consumer level. As my colleague Steve Lohr notes, Microsoft is "mainly a supplier of technology to concern customers" these days.
But like Amazon, Microsoft has a cloud service, and then a few sites went dark for me, as did ii Microsoft-endemic services I used frequently, LinkedIn and Skype. Non being able to apply tech giant-endemic services I love was a hazard of this experiment: As The Wall Street Journal noted, the tech giants have bought more 400 companies and commencement-ups over the last decade.
Critics of the big tech companies are often told, "If you don't like the company, don't apply its products." My takeaway from the experiment was that it's not possible to do that. It's not just the products and services branded with the large tech behemothic'due south name. It'south that these companies control a thicket of more obscure products and services that are hard to untangle from tools we rely on for everything nosotros do, from work to getting from point A to point B.
Many people chosen what I did "digital veganism." Digital vegans are deliberative about the hardware and software they employ and the information they eat and share, because information is power, and increasingly a scattering of companies seem to have information technology all.
There were two very dissimilar types of reaction to the story. Some people said that information technology proved just how essential these companies are to the American economy and how useful they are to consumers, meaning regulators shouldn't interfere with them. Others, like Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and ex officio member of the House's antitrust commission, said at the fourth dimension that the experiment was proof of their monopolistic power.
"By virtue of controlling essential infrastructure, these companies appear to have the ability to control access to markets," Mr. Nadler said. "In some bones 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, only also creating a key chokehold that the railroad monopolies could exploit."
If I were still blocking the tech giants today, I wouldn't take been able to watch this calendar week's antitrust hearing online. C-SPAN streamed it alive via YouTube, which Google owns.
Afterward the experiment was over, though, I went back to using the companies' services again, because as it demonstrated, I didn't actually have any other choice.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-tech-giants.html