Big Tech
[2] It typically refers to the Big Five United States tech companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft;[3][4][5] or the Magnificent Seven, which includes Nvidia and Tesla.
[11] In the early 2020s, software developers and cryptocurrency users responded to the perceived excesses of the tech giants by starting a movement called web3[12][13][14] to incorporate blockchain-based decentralization into the World Wide Web.
[59] Nvidia crossed $1 trillion in market capitalization by May 2023,[60] and by the end of 2024, had surpassed Amazon and Alphabet while vying with Microsoft and Apple for the most valuable publicly-traded U.S.
[75] Smaller companies like Adobe, IBM, Netflix, Oracle, Salesforce, Snap, Uber, and X are sometimes referred to as Big Tech due to their popular influence.
The acronym FANG was coined in 2013 by Jim Cramer, the television host of CNBC's Mad Money, to refer to Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.
[119] Nikos Smyrnaios argued in 2016 that four phenomena allowed Big Tech to emerge: technological convergence, deregulation, globalization, and financialization.
Globalization allowed Big Tech companies to minimize their tax burden and pay foreign workers lower wages.
[120][121] Without the legal requirement for content moderation, online services could innovate freely and achieved rapid growth in the early days of the Internet.
[123] Legal scholar Tim Wu speculated that Big Tech acquisitions could create "kill zones" that stifle competition by taking potential competitors out of the marketplace.
He also argued that they concentrate power by horizontally integrating different services such as email, instant messaging, online searching, downloading, and streaming across platforms.
[137] Nikos Smyrnaios described Big Tech as an oligopoly that dominates the information technology market through anti-competitive practices, ever-increasing economic power, and intellectual property.
[138] In July 2020, the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law interviewed the CEOs of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
[141] During Trump's speech that incited the January 6 United States Capitol attack, he accused Big Tech of rigging the 2020 election and promised to "get rid of" Section 230.
"[142] After Trump's Twitter account was suspended, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief spokesman Steffen Seibert noted that Merkel found Twitter's halt of Trump's account "problematic", adding that legislators, not private companies, should decide on any necessary curbs to free expression if hate speech incites violence.
[143][144] According to a February 2021 report by New York University researchers, conservative claims of social media censorship could be considered disinformation because the deleted statements were false.
[145][146] Conservatives argued that Facebook and Twitter limiting the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy "proves Big Tech's bias".
[151] Warren accused the company of having the "ability to shut down a debate" and called for "a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor".
[152][153] In 2025, Meta's Facebook, Elon Musk's X, Google's YouTube, and other tech companies agreed to address online hate speech by enforcing a revised code of conduct aligned with European Commission rules.
"[166] In response to the criticism, Big Tech companies deleted numerous social media accounts and banned health-related false advertising.
In the big data age, technologists and people in general find it valuable to view emerging technologies with a critical lens, one of which is geared toward the environment.
On May 9, 2019, the Parliament of France passed a law intended to force Big Tech to pay publishers for the reuse of substantial amounts of copyrighted content (related rights).
[178] Concerns over monopolistic practices have led to antitrust investigations in Big Tech from both United States and European Union regulatory agencies.
[179][180][181][182] These investigations have raised concerns around Big Tech on privacy, market power, freedom of speech, national security, and law enforcement.
Microsoft imposed legal and technical restrictions on PC manufacturers and users preventing them from uninstalling Internet Explorer and using Netscape or Java.
[190] The United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law investigated Big Tech in June 2020, and published a report in January 2021 concluding that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta operated in an anticompetitive manner.
[191][192] On June 24, 2021, the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law held hearings on proposed Big Tech regulations.
The order also instructed the FTC to establish rules related to the use of data collection by Big Tech companies for promoting their own services.
[205][206] The EU also passed the Digital Services Act (DSA) in April 2022, which requires tech companies to take down hate speech and child sexual abuse, and ban advertising targeting gender, race, religion, and childhood.
[208] The EU defined Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft as "gatekeepers" under the DMA in September 2023, and required them to comply by March 2024.
[15] Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2.0, in which they claim user-generated content is controlled by a small group of companies referred to as Big Tech.
