Big Tech companies govern our lives. It’s time they’re held accountable for it

Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, and the author of We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age, which won the 2024 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Her next book, Mirrored States, will be published in 2027.

In the digital realm, small mistakes can result in big consequences.

On July 19, 2024, a faulty software update from a company most people had never heard of grounded global air travel from Hong Kong to Hamburg. Hospitals couldn’t access medical records or schedule appointments. Banks froze payments. Millions of people suddenly found themselves cut off from everyday services they assumed were reliable, all because of one cybersecurity company: CrowdStrike.

What was a planned routine update from CrowdStrike triggered the largest global IT incident on record, crippling more than 8.5 million Windows machines. They fixed the bug the same day, but the fallout lingered.

Images of stranded travellers and closed retail terminals peppered the news. Delta Airlines cancelled 7,000 flights and has since been cleared to sue CrowdStrike for the losses.

What the CrowdStrike fiasco revealed is that we’re governed continuously, and unavoidably, by a complicated, interconnected and deeply enmeshed system of data-intensive platforms. That is, technologies (often working seamlessly in the background) structure how we live. When they fail, we feel the lack of order – the lack of governance – immediately.

Technologies govern. Governance means setting the conditions under which people live, play and work – establishing rules, shaping expectations and allocating resources. When we say “Big Tech,” we mean the many companies that govern our lives, through their platforms that traffic in data.

It’s time we acknowledge that governance explicitly. As governors, Big Tech companies should take accountability for the outsized role they play in our lives.

We often talk about Big Tech as if it were just Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft – the Big Five. Add Tesla and Nvidia if you like – the Magnificent Seven, instead. What unifies them is economic: market capitalization, stock valuations or shares across markets.

What if we thought about “bigness” as their embeddedness and indispensability in our lives? Not just user base, but the depth of our collective and individual entanglement with the platforms they run. These companies create platforms for users to access online resources. Through these platforms, they collect, store and analyze the behavioural data about and made by humans.

I recently chatted with a friend about libraries over dinner as we shared photos on our phones – and libraries popped up in her socials and online ads the next day. When my sister was house hunting, she and I were texting about a Midwestern city I was speaking in; the next day, her suggested houses included properties in that city, thousands of kilometres away from her targeted search. Big Tech companies mediate communication, commerce, transportation, entertainment, education, health care, and social services – and, now, they’re our portals to AI.

Big Tech companies, it can be said, not only control the means of connection through platforms, but also the means to computation as organizations and individuals rely increasingly on AI, which in turn depends on cloud computing. Platforms pull us in and data encourage us to stay. Your connectivity gives you access to a share of computation that is not otherwise possible.

Governing is about creating a shared order with enforceable expectations. Since the Second World War, we’ve lived in a world where governance is presumed to be, and set up as, the domain of states, or governments. Today, we live in a world of multiple governors: states, yes, but also Big Tech governance.

Big Tech governs through:

• Data: More data means better platforms; better platforms attract more users; more users produce more data. These self-reinforcing network effects give companies reach no state could achieve.

• Platforms: The apps we use to direct our automated, internet-connected devices – from smart thermostats to office tools – create shared expectations and behaviours. Platforms create and control those digital networks: consumers to markets, business to business. It’s not about the hardware so much as the software that runs on top.

From data-intensive platforms, Big Tech companies learn and steer human behaviours and choices. With current AI models’ power and data-hungry tendencies, computation is now the domain of the cloud, which is the engine of artificial intelligence, logistics, social networks and online services. The data, platforms and computation are mutually reinforcing, making better services that keep you online.

The marvel and challenge is that technologies have enabled companies to govern. Like governments, they are rather difficult to forsake.

You can (usually) opt out of social media. You can opt out of voting. You can sometimes emigrate to a different country.

But do you have a job? Do you have a cellphone? Do you use e-mail or make digital payments? Have you passed by a smart doorbell like Ring or Nest? If so, you’re already in the cloud, and you can’t opt out of Big Tech governance.

Within days of each other, in October, 2025, two of the three biggest cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure, erred and crashed.

It was a dark October for thousands of businesses and, by extension, millions of people worldwide. The outages touched companies as varied as Alaska Airlines, Costco, Snapchat, Slack, Vodaphone, and Coinbase, government services such as Britain’s HM Revenue and Customs, and anyone using Microsoft 365. Online gaming “tilted” as Roblox, Pokémon Go, Epic Games and the PlayStation Network went dark.

One unique casualty was Eight Sleep, a company that sells “smart beds” with temperature controls, sensors and adjustable bases. When AWS went down, the beds malfunctioned. Customers found themselves stuck upright, overheated or shivering until the outage was resolved.

Most of us don’t own smart beds. But most of us have smartphones. Moreover, we all depend on platforms for our work, communication and finances. That dependence becomes obvious only when something breaks.

We saw this during the 2021 Facebook outage, in which a configuration error of the company’s internal systems took down Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram for six hours. Roughly 3.5 billion social network users lost access, but so did 200 million businesses that rely on such platforms to reach customers. In many parts of the world, WhatsApp is the way people communicate. Other users mused philosophically about who they really were without digital social networks, both as connections, and their personhood altogether.

Technical problems must be recognized as social and political problems. A small error in one system can cascade through dozens of others, toppling the digital dominoes that underpin daily life. Platforms come in many forms. There are consumer-facing ones, such as TikTok, business-oriented ones, such as Salesforce, and ones that enable the world to run, providing compute for our lives to work, such as Amazon Web Services.

“Compute” is a term that technical types use to describe the resources needed to complete tasks, from loading websites to large language models like ChatGPT. These days, the interwoven nature of platforms creating, sharing and storing data that needs to be accessed quickly requires an incredible amount of compute, and it’s not cheap.

This leaves us vulnerable to how Big Tech platforms govern us. They don’t have to actively collude to govern us across all the different domains of human life – social, political, cultural and economic. What they possess is much more elementary: Big Tech companies have invented and maintain the means to connectivity and computation that underlie modern societies.

This is a call to see Big Tech for what it is: a governor. Their power and motivation ostensibly come from the market, but their reach goes far, far beyond that. The word “governor” more accurately characterizes what they do, and also, how we should view their powers. If we understand them better, we can also imagine different strategies to reduce their disproportionate dominance in the economy and control of data, among other things.

When we look back at other “big” sectors, they’ve historically been active in limited areas. Think Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco.

But Big Tech has moved beyond those limits and enmeshed itself in society and lives through platforms, and leverages the data collected from those platforms to govern us in ways that are hard to imagine ever giving Standard Oil or Philip Morris.

We haven’t seen business models like Big Tech before, because prior to the internet era, we didn’t have the technology that has allowed companies to create the widespread tools and data collection capacity that we know today. This capacity enables them to govern.

There’s a saying: If you’re not paying, you’re the product. We’ve moved beyond this implied choice. You’re governed, whether you pay or not.

Governments haven’t been exactly enthusiastic about shaking up the bargain with Big Tech. But they also seem stuck in an antagonistic dynamic.

Somewhere along the way we’ve been swept up into this idea that states and companies are at loggerheads. But in digital technologies, governments (particularly the U.S. government) have been a key investor and developer of tools we take for granted. Expansive studies have shown that many of the things we take for granted in our smartphones, from GPS to touchscreen displays to the very internet that enables their smartness, are based on government-funded research.

Generative AI models like ChatGPT and many others benefited from Canadian government funding. Canada led the way among states in national support with the Pan-Canadian AI strategy.

Aside from losing the thread of government support enabling innovation, governments have played an exasperating game of whack-a-mole, chasing the symptoms of Big Tech governance on companies’ terms. You don’t win the game by trying to whack those moles with what they give you. The mallet’s too small and it’s tied to the machine itself, putting you at a disadvantage from the start. To stand a chance of winning, you either drop the mallet and use your hands, or you figure out the underlying mechanism’s pattern of revealing those smiling little mole faces.

If anything, some government forays have intensified the problem. The U.S. declaring Google a monopoly hasn’t resulted in profound changes. In fact, Amit Mehta, the Washington, D.C.–based U.S. federal judge overseeing the Google antitrust case, made it such that Google was required to share search data with other companies, which only spreads the wealth embedded in those data.

Similarly, the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) places special demands on the “gatekeeper” companies, including that they must make data available to other businesses.

Sharing data makes the hold data-intensive platforms has on us worse, even as it introduces “competition” by undercutting the most powerful firms. Several of the EU’s regulatory mechanisms rely upon heavy fines as deterrents and punishments. For example, the DMA can levy fines up to 10 per cent of a company’s annual revenue, an admittedly impressive penalty. But fines are only effective if they can be collected and not ensnared in courts for years.

Holding a handful of massive companies responsible does not address the underlying system of data-intensive platforms. While it’s normal to focus on some very prominent companies, we lose sight of the fact that in the very short history of the internet, Big Data and AI constantly introduce new players that can bring down seemingly unstoppable giants (pause here for AOL, Yahoo! and MySpace).

More importantly, it perpetuates the idea that states need to whack companies into submission. Sometimes, positive incentives matter just as much (if not more) than punishments.

The answer to ineffective governance isn’t to let companies do what they wish. Far from it.

First, states don’t have to be punitive (or use “sticks”) to govern. They can also change the incentives of other governors, by using “carrots.” As we know from international relations, power can be soft or hard, and hard power doesn’t always prevail. Second, acknowledging that Big Tech companies are governors isn’t just rhetorical. It means that they take on responsibilities of governing, just as governments do.

Practically speaking, governments can wield power without force. For one, states have the power of procurement. They need a lot more digital infrastructure than most customers, and the private sector wants those lucrative government contracts. For as much talk as there is about the antipathy between states and Big Tech, the companies benefit immensely from government largesse.

Tech Inquiry revealed in 2022 that U.S. military and intelligence agencies, alone, had awarded US$28-billion to Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet from 2018 to 2022.

Procurement can come with strings attached. Journalists at The Guardian recently exposed the lengths to which Google and Amazon went to win a US$1.2-billion cloud contract with the Israeli government (“Project Nimbus”). The deal included a “winking” alert system that notified Israeli officials whenever their cloud-stored data was queried, and provisions preventing either company from cutting off Israel’s access to their technologies–even if the terms of service were violated.

Procurement is governance by wallet, but not punishment. Governments can embed requirements for complying with government policies in the contracts themselves. Thus, any value, be they transparency, security, oversight, accountability or rights, can become requirements in the contracts tech companies seek. In Canada, government can set standards on procurement through policies at the Treasury Board, or consider each case individually.

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Another tool states have is the power of incentives, often called market-based policies (as opposed to punitive command and control policies). Think about how governments created supply and demand for electric vehicles in relatively short order. State-driven investments can support important research to overcome existing problems; it’s also a way for governments to channel support as they see fit.

This is the approach that Canada seems to be following with the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy and the recently proposed $1-billion over the next five years designated for AI and quantum research in the 2025 budget.

It has also announced a registry to report federal government uses of AI. The Canadian AI Safety Institute, created under the Trudeau government with a relatively modest $50-million, signals an intention to support research on the political and social effects of AI systems.

There is no escape hatch from the digital world. Even without AI, platforms would still shape how we communicate, shop, work and live. But calling them “governors” allows us to see their power for what it is – and to use more tools to reshape it.

Importantly, calling Big Tech companies governors gives us – the public, governments, other companies – the right to demand accountability and responsibility in line with the outsized power these firms wield. We expect states to hold other actors accountable because they represent the public.

In turn, constituencies hold governments to account. No one or few entities ought to dominate all others. Why wouldn’t we demand the same responsibility from other governors that we demand from governments?

Overcoming their dominance requires creativity, a willingness to use incentives and a recognition that platforms, like states, are governors in the digital age.