The Silent Infrastructure — Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism

The internet ‘belongs to no one’ — that ideal was the backbone running through this whole series. Yet from the 2000s onward, reality began to betray the ideal. A handful of companies, rising from the ashes of the bubble, took search, shopping, and human connection into their own hands, and became the ‘silent infrastructure’ that undergirds every part of our daily lives. And behind that convenience, a new kind of capitalism was advancing — one that turns human behaviour itself into a commodity.

Scale Begets Scale

Why did a net that was supposed to belong to no one end up gripped by a handful of companies? The key lies in ‘network effects’.

A service with more users becomes more useful, and because it is useful, it draws still more users. Search grows smarter the more it is used; a social network is harder to leave the more friends you have on it. In this way a virtuous cycle takes hold — ‘scale begets scale’ — and the vast troves of accumulated data rise as a high wall before any newcomer. The result is ‘winner-take-all’. Today, five companies — Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Microsoft — are known as ‘Big Tech’, and their combined market capitalisation has grown to account for roughly a quarter of the S&P 500, the index that represents America’s leading stocks.

They also honed the tactics for defending their dominance. One is the acquisition that the legal scholar Tim Wu called the ‘kill zone’. In 2012, Facebook bought the still-tiny Instagram — swallowing a future rival before it could grow independent and become a threat. Or take 2010, when Amazon forced its competitor Diapers.com into submission with loss-making price cuts and drove it into an acquisition. Fencing users inside their own ecosystem and making it hard to move elsewhere — high switching costs became the moat of the empire.

You, as a ‘Prediction Product’

Yet Big Tech’s true innovation is not monopoly itself. It lies in the mechanism — how, exactly, does one earn enormous profits from a free service? Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff named it ‘surveillance capitalism’.

The logic runs like this. We search, we click, we move, we press ‘like’. Each of those actions is ceaselessly harvested as data. Companies analyse it and craft ‘prediction products’ that forecast what we are likely to do next. And they sell these predictions to advertisers in a ‘behavioural futures market’. Just as Ford and GM once opened up the capitalism of mass production, Google’s advertising system AdWords pioneered this new capitalism, and Facebook followed. The price of the convenience we receive for free is not money. It is our very behaviour — and the predictability of our future.

Its eeriness was captured by the location-based game Pokémon GO, which swept the world in 2016. Players thought they were merely playing, yet moment by moment they were handing over their real-world movement data. Then came the Cambridge Analytica scandal, exposed in 2018, which revealed that a vast trove of personal data leaked from Facebook had been used in the 2016 US presidential election to psychologically profile voters and to predict and manipulate their behaviour. Surveillance capitalism was no longer a matter of shopping. It had reached the very foundations of democracy.

Can the Empire Be Reined In?

Against this immense power, state authority is at last beginning to move.

The European Union enacted the GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) to protect personal data, placing limits on the surveillance-capitalist abuse of data. Then in 2022 it passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which strictly regulates giant tech firms as ‘gatekeepers’. In April 2025, breaches of this DMA brought huge fines — 500 million euros on Apple and 200 million euros on Meta. In the United States too, in August 2024, a federal court found Google’s search business to be an unlawful monopoly, and the following year a similar ruling was handed down over its advertising technology.

The internet was born as a distributed net meant to survive a nuclear strike, designed so that no one could ever control it. That same net is now held by a handful of empires, and the state is trying to rein those empires in. The ideal of ‘distribution and sharing’ against the reality of ‘concentration and control’. The tug-of-war between them is now facing a historic turning point.

But it was not companies alone that fixed their eyes on the ‘power to see’ held by the platforms. When the state reached for that power in the name of surveillance and censorship, the net that was supposed to have bound the world into one began to crack along national borders. The story continues, toward the future of a divided internet.