Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration
127 comments
·June 20, 2025seydor
Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.
There is a simple path to EU sovereignity, china has already done it: Ban US services in order to spring up local alternatives. Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling. then you won't have to bother with "big tech".
But all of that would require doing actual work, and judging by the list of signatories, they don't want to do it.
imiric
> Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.
If the corporations conduct business in the EU, they must abide by EU regulation. How this impacts the corporations in practice is not EU's concern. Requiring a break up seems sensible given the situation.
> Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling
No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way, which has existed since the dawn of the internet. The main reason companies don't like it is precisely because it doesn't allow them to control resources and hoard capital.
intended
I raise the counter that all decentralized systems eventually become centralized once they reach mass appeal.
At a mass scale, the users on the network are not sophisticated or trained, and end up having very common failures that result in a move to a trusted central authority.
Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content?
Bad actors alone, are a sufficient force that generates social pressure that drives centralization through regulation.
But thats an easy example, the other force is the unsophistication of the average person - as a result they gravitate towards tools that simplify their lives, and do a lot of the work they are not interested in doing.
When network effects come into play, this creates a pressure where firms with more resources buy smaller players and consolidate, once again creating a small network.
People don’t want to deal with the over head of creating new accounts for example, or the overhead of moving their content from X service to Y.
hopelite
> No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way
To emphasize that a bit; I argue what we need is public, open standards that, e.g., prevent social media lock-in or make government computer and networking contracts open to real competition, not just Microsoft licensed resellers competing on who adds less middleman markup.
oezi
I think the EU is fighting a hard fight with the tech companies and is doing so within a framework which doesn't seek to alienate the US. Alternate app stores, global minimum taxation, etc. are really hard fights.
whacko_quacko
I agree, that the EU breaking up the tech giants is insane, but I don't think that banning them is much better. How would you enforce this? I don't want a big firewall like china has.
I'd argue for open protocols that allow exporting your data and switching services instead. Make export capabilities a requirement akin to data protection laws, and you have defanged the monopolistic nature of tech. Ideally also force interoperability between services, but that's a whole other can of worms.
This is on paper obviously much harder than just banning something, because you would have to define such exchange protocols, but it has a chance of success. One could start with certain industries, like social media, and in some cases build on existing work, like the AT or ActivityPub protocols.
DSingularity
You can enforce it if you provide alternatives. The problem is they don’t want to do that part.
raz32dust
This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.
FranzFerdiNaN
> US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies.
Even more reason that the EU should work as hard as possible to get rid of their reliance on American companies. America is no longer a trusted partner.
pyman
I agree. Breaking up Big Tech might seem like going after windmills but maybe it's time to protect our local industries before we're all stuck buying abroad from monopolies that dictate what we see, buy and even think. A bit of protectionism now could mean healthier markets later. Less tech oligopoly, more tech diversity.
+1
swiftcoder
> US-EU and US-China relation is very different
It certainly was very different - maybe less clear that it will remain so.
The whole tariffs debacle, the threat that the US won't back NATO allies in the event of Russian aggression, wavering US support for Ukraine... The EU is starting to see a need to pivot away from reliance on the US.
Without that relationship, a lot of US tech firm offerings are going to look much worse (i.e. we might quickly see an end to overlooking blatant tax evasion and GDPR violations)
computerthings
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Creator71
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veunes
That's one way to look at it, though an outright ban might cause a lot of collateral damage for users and businesses
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Havoc
Don't think EU could do an outright ban. Would need to be a decade+ transition.
They really should aggressively push this though
PartiallyTyped
Unless European companies start paying higher salaries it won’t happen, and unless we produce ways to get more funding in startups that won’t happen either.
The former is to some extend a consequence of the latter, which is a consequence of EU being a confederation and not a federation, we have N smaller markets all competing with each other. Who do we kid other than ourselves by expressing that we can compete?
keiferski
As an American living in Europe for the last decade: there are actually quite a few small tech companies that are quite strong in their regions. I’m thinking of companies like Allegro.pl, which IMO is better than Amazon.
The problem seems to be that there is no real coherence to expanding local companies beyond their origin countries. Partially because of other competitors, which each country wants to promote their own, and partially because the whole infrastructure for serving ~30 states is a headache.
IMO major benefits would come from investing heavily into translation AI tech. Europe will never have one main language, and so it won’t have the single unified cultural market that China or the US have. But that can be reduced dramatically to make it as seamless as possible.
yu3zhou4
Allegro is really a top notch service, they already scaled to other EU countries, I hope they will go global one day. Same for BLIK (instant payments with a numeric code) and InPost (very quick packages delivery to package machines all over the country)
keiferski
BLIK is awesome and really makes American payment systems seem like a generation behind.
veunes
Even basic things like payment systems, logistics, and consumer protection rules vary a lot
soco
Now if there was some kind of interoperability standard... but anyway yes I can confirm: most "local" cloud providers are much too local for the taste of big consumers, and those big consumers (banks, insurances...) usually dictate the market direction. What is also helping is the amount of paperwork the big tech can provide to cya reasons - apparently the smaller folks aren't trusted to compete on the legal fronts.
veunes
While monopoly power is an issue, fragmentation could also lead to unintended consequences (think privacy/security fragmentation or entrenching local gatekeepers). I'm skeptical this kind of structural breakup would magically “fix” the internet, but stronger and more consistent enforcement of existing competition and privacy laws seems like a good starting point
awongh
I'm not against this in principle but I am a little skeptical that it would actually work in this case- I think search could be a good case for this (Google) but it's also in the process of being disrupted by LLMs so I feel like it's becoming less relevant.
One thing that I do believe could be relevant is regulation that forces open the platforms- social media and messaging as an open standard. Now that the technical underpinnings of it are well understood I don't know why we couldn't have an open standard for making posts that my real friends could see and rich-media standard for me sending messages and being in group messages. It's ridiculous that we're locked into these messaging platforms that want to show us ads when the tech to run these things is well understood and should be commodified in a more open market. The cost of switching should be near zero.
fifticon
These communication platforms are a source of power and control, there are big interests involved who do not want to let this opportunity for power slip between their fingers.
blackqueeriroh
And you think OpenAI (long rumored to be an interested buyer of Chrome) is less of an interest?
dgellow
You’re not actually locked, and the open protocols exist
awongh
You're locked in because everyone else is already on the closed one and the switching costs are too high.
If the big companies were legally required to allow you to migrate your group texts onto another platform with a push of a button then I would say you're not locked in anymore.
Companies would complain that "it's not technically possible"- but of course we all know it's completely doable.
dgellow
I know the rhetoric but I disagree. You can create accounts on open protocol platforms for free. You don’t have to do a cost intensive migration. You can use multiple platforms at the same time. Over time you can influence your peers to move to the open protocol platform more (assuming it’s actually one that considered UX seriously).
The feeling that you’re locked is more a psychological barrier you have to pass than anything else
zoobab
Antitrust barely works, when it's not a monopoly it's an oligopoly.
And remedies are often pocket money.
For Microsoft Windows, antitrust authorities and courts did not do anything.
intended
Anti trust forced a different behavior on the MSFT borg of that era. Threats with teeth force firms to treat them seriously.
accurrent
I feel like we bolt anti-trust after a market has developed. For instance, we go after big tech once it has entrenched itself. Whatabout taking pro-active action. For instance, in the ML market we should be sponsoring a gajillion companies to take on chip design so that we don't end up with a future where NVidia is the sole provider of AI chips. We should foster open standards and penalize companies for not adopting/hijacking them where possible. Similarly we need to make sure the zoo of ML model providers survives rather than consolidateing to a few. I think there may be ways to do this without being adverserial about it.
davemp
NIST is supposed to serve this purpose but is very underfunded
fifticon
It partially used to work, but a lot of the legal underpinnings were dismantled in the late 90's, and parts of it possibly also in the reagan era. Right now, MS is doing again with Edge, what they were already slapped rather harshly for, back in the 90's.
swiftcoder
> MS is doing again with Edge, what they were already slapped rather harshly for, back in the 90's
The situation feels a little bit different, given that they in this case the ones going up against a deeply-entrenched web monopoly, with a fork of that monopoly's own codebase...
FranzFerdiNaN
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Guess we should just let companies go hogwild and create a cyberpunk dystopia.
benchly
Or worse, destabilize society to the point of catastrophic collapse like the Accelerationists depicted in Mountainhead, though that film was pulling punches.
__loam
We slap these people on the wrist and you declare nothing we do works. No wonder.
fastball
How would Europe break up American tech companies, in practice?
tacker2000
They can fine them or forbid them to do business until it happens. Big tech does a lot of revenue there, i’m sure they wont abandon europe just because of this.
See the Apple USB-C case.
fastball
The Apple USB-C case is requiring a corporation to comply with regulations.
Breaking up a company means a subset is being separated from the parent company, in a way where the parent company is no longer deriving value from the (former) subsidiary.
In that context, why would Apple say "sure we will sever part of our business to be fully independent" rather than "ok we will no longer operate in Europe"? They lose the business either way, but the first scenario sets a bad precedent for them and encourages other countries/leagues/unions to try the same.
marginalia_nu
If Europe wants their own tech companies on par with the American ones, it should first and foremost fix a business climate that caters to such companies emerging. If we drive the American businesses out of Europe without doing so first, we'll more than likely end up even further in the direction of turning the EU into the second coming of the DDR.
pjerem
Except the US tech is locking any compatibility layer one after the other. Every OS release is now more locked down than the previous one. Every piece of hardware is totally locked down.
What this means is that it's harder and harder to create new hard tech (e.g. OSes, computers, phones ...) that is compatible with what's existing now.
Let's make a thinking experiment : Imagine that somehow an european company is magically releasing the most perfect phone you would ever imagine but it's not running an american OS ?
No app ecosystem, no possibility to bootstrap it. You can't connect to your friends that are using closed IM apps. You can't access this Google doc "file" someone just sent you without using Google suite...
And that's because we lost the war for standards. File standards, protocol standards. This ship has sail a long time ago.
And the issue is not only for this magical theorical european company.
Americans are also deluding themselves if they think this situation is good for them, this issue isn't unique to Europe, it would be the same for any american company trying to compete with Google or Apple. Except it would be even worse because they could be easily bought by existent actors if they managed to succeed.
In fact, everyone would gain form breaking tech giants, europeans, for sure, but especially americans.
Puts
You hear this over and over again that Europe is over-regulated and this is why tech-companies don't succeed here. I would say this is utter bullshit. If you look at the acquisitions made by the tech-giants it just that anything that is going to be successful is instantly bought up by these companies.
People probably don't know how little Google for example builds in-house with everything from Analytics to Gmail being of European origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
madaxe_again
The problem runs deeper than business climate - it’s cultural.
Across most of Europe (not all - the Baltic states have produced quite a few unicorns) there’s a pervasive attitude that technology is… icky. Struggling to come up with a better way of putting it, but at best entrepreneurship in tech is met with blank incomprehension, and at worst sneering contempt. People use it, unthinkingly, but to be interested in it, to invest in it, seems to fall into the category of “we must have world peace before we spend money on space exploration”.
Yes, this is hand-wavy, but in my experience as a tech entrepreneur in Europe, if you want investment, you talk to the Americans. If you want a growth market, you target the Americans. If you don’t want to be justifying your price tag 20 times a day… you get the picture.
Of course there exist incubators, funds, and so-forth, but the money on the table is a pittance compared to the U.S., and again, the culture here is like “why don’t you get a real job, train as a lawyer, a doctor, or a banker, and stop playing video games?” when you’re running a profitable technical startup.
dgfitz
Europe has been basically begging the US to abandon them for the past few months. Why wouldn’t the US oblige?
tacker2000
What are you talking about? If you mean the current US administration, what does that have to do with Big Tech?
maizeq
I would encourage everyone to check out the other two major priorities of this movement. Of particular importance I think is the removal of recommender systems and opaque algorithms from feeds, which can and have been powerful instigators of misinformation, propaganda and discord.
sylware
In order to do that, you have to consider the technical plane, or big tech will work around everything, maliciously: we need _lean_ open source software (including the SDK) and protocols, stable in time. This will foster real-life citizen/local/commercial alternatives. This is actually hard and dynamic to do, people in charge will face acute lobbying and pressure, and they have to bath in technical sauce all the time.
For instance the web: noscript/basic (x)html for all dominant/critical online services, where reasonable. Or you will be jailed into the 2.5 engines of the whatng cartel. A few years back I could buy thingies with wallet codes using lynx/links/elinks/netsurf/w3m/etc web browsers on amazon.fr... now you MUST have a whatng web engine... how convenient... and recently, noscript browsers (which have a "non famous" user agent string), won't be able to perform a search on google anymore...
Video streaming sites can put text ads (clearly identified) into a 2D HTML document and can provide HLS/dash/etc <video>&|<audio> URLs (and can inject ads into the video stream if they want to) which the browser will send to a media player.
Chatting? One-time-usage IRC bridge URL with optional custom IRC commands which the browser will send to a IRC client?
Namely, you can augment this noscript/basic (x)html portal with some "web APIs" or even leaner(simpler?) protocols, with proper online publication and definition ofc.
The same attention should be given to the usage of PDF too. Generating a PDF with only utf-8 text should be "easy" and it is actually not really the case.
And the list goes on.
And you cannot 'break up' US companies, but you can make them "behave" if they want to do business in EU, and don't forget they have the backing of funds with thousands of billions of $ and they already have their own billions, in other words: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition here as they can spend out of business everybody (what they usually do over cycles of ~5-10 years or even longer) or "buy" anybody (until properly "disabled", then they are thrown away).
Don't forget about EU companies and gov administrations too... those can be straighten with much more convincing.
Basically the benchmark is the following: where appropriate, it should be "reasonable" for a few average devs/one average dev, with a lean SDK (including the programming language), to write real-life alternatives (citizen/local/commercial).
Mistletoe
I would put forth the assertion that Big Tech is more damaging than Standard Oil or US steel ever were. Altering the human mind at will is so much more dangerous than higher oil or steel prices ever could be.
veunes
It's not just about market dominance or pricing anymore; it's about shaping public discourse
fifticon
I'm willing to call them equally bad. Making the world inhospitable through global warning, is pretty high on the list in my view..
blibble
big tech on their way to speedrunning that too, with the AI data centre buildout
https://esgnews.com/ai-boom-drives-150-surge-in-indirect-emi...
kortilla
Neither of those were concerns for US steel or standard oil breakups.
blackqueeriroh
lol, “altering the human mind at will” is a pretty wild claim. Without people choosing to open phones? Computers? Spending hours on the internet a day?
swiftcoder
People don't really choose those things anymore. A generation of us got to choose it a long while back, but the last few decades of everyone making that same choice has made it pretty inevitable - you can't bank without a smartphone, you can't do shit without access to email and/or SMS, you can't stay in contact with friends without a popular instant messaging platform...
Short of moving to a cabin in the woods, network effects hold us all hostage to the mind-altering, ad-delivering, capitalism machine
noman-land
It's not true and every time people say this they preemptively build their own prison.
Having a smartphone doesn't have to mean being subjected to algorithmic feeds, advertising and corporate spying. Keeping in touch with friends doesn't have to be mediated by billionaires. All you have to do is be willing to have a life that isn't 100% convenient at all times in every direction.
Signal is free and cross platform. There is literally no reason people can't download and use it instead of the other messengers.
GrapheneOS is nearly perfect and works with every single app I've tried, including finance and travel.
Web versions of apps exist.
You can actually ask the people you care about to change their behavior for you, underlining all the risks with the current way. People act as if downloading a new app is an insurmountable task. It'll just sit there and send notifications. What's this mental block people have?
You can do SO MANY things before moving to a cabin in the woods.
The door of the prison is unlocked, dude. You don't have to stay inside just cuz you're used to being there.
sofixa
> Without people choosing to open phones? Computers? Spending hours on the internet a day?
Exploiting basic human psychology to incite people to come back to consume whatever you're giving them (small dopamine hits) doesn't absolve the people doing it, but it doesn't absolve the people exploiting it either.
> “altering the human mind at will” is a pretty wild claim
How is it wild? Humans are social animals, and there have been numerous studies on the effect of social media on teenagers (up to and including body dysmorphia and suicides) or politics, including influencing the results of referenda or elections, or even starting riots.
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pmdr
It's not a monopoly if it's at least 5 companies /s
bilbo0s
Let's be honest about what they're targeting..
the problem is US tech dominance.
So Europe sees a need to break that sooner or Later.
So yes, the list of companies to rein in has as many companies as they need to affect the security and economic changes the Europeans would like to see.
I would say we (the US) should negotiate with them, but considering the negotiating prowess of the current admin, maybe now is not the right time for that?
voxlax
It´s in the best interest of the people in the US to have the dominance of those corporations broken, before those companies eliminate democracy.
They keep mentioning Google ad monopoly and how it "unfairly sucks revenue from publishers, killing journalism and the news media, while forcing consumers to pay more through an “adtech tax” to industry middlemen.".
Those publishers don't have to be listed by Google, they can opt out, right? Let's assume Google disappears, how are publishers getting more money that they are getting now? Do they envision some publishers' owned search engine more efficient than Google which people flock to once other options are removed? Can someone convince me that Google is actually bad for traditional publishers/journalists?