Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services.<p>Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having <i>nothing</i> to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same.<p>So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.