Alison Rowat: Tech giants knocking on door of last chance saloon

Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, a chief executive who is to advertising what Apple’s Tim Cook is to computing, backed the call for more regulation, likening Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to Rockefeller.

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Neither Mr Benioff nor Sir Martin could be regarded as hotheads launching unfair attacks on firms that earn billions. Ditto Prince William, who this week accused social media giants of harming society. “There is no doubt that public debate seems coarser and more personal than ever, fuelled partly by anonymity online and the commercialisation of our news,” said the man who will one day be king.

Nor could one describe as unreasonable those citizens of San Francisco who protest regularly at the luxury “Google buses” which ferry 8500 highly paid tech workers around the city every day. The placard wavers just want affordable rents. Equally riled are the owners of Apple phones who swear they will never buy another after the company admitted slowing down ageing devices.

Be it Davos or East Dunbartonshire, individual governments or the EU, you do not have to go far these days to find someone unhappy with the tech giants. How did it get to this point? How did the likes of Google, famously founded on the motto “Don’t be evil”, come to be regarded as a cross between Darth Vader and nettle rash? Why do all those cool guys who gave us stuff for free suddenly look like bread-heads and knaves?

These are the questions, if not coached precisely in those terms, firms themselves are asking in meetings with public affairs consultants whose job it is to ensure chief executives going before MPs or news cameras do not take any more maulings. It is not difficult to see why the public is fixing Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google and the rest with a gimlet eye.

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Like citizens of Troy, we are suddenly looking at the giant horse in our midst and wondering if we should have been quite so eager to roll out the welcome mat.

Whether it is failing to crack down on offensive material, spreading fake news, or pinching content, you can find as many reasons to turn on tech giants as there are Apple stores in the UK or Amazon parcels delivered to your door. To boil it down, what we talk about when we discuss tech firms overstepping the mark is a loss of control; the sense that, as with cigarettes, we have been persuaded to take up a habit, social media in particular, that is proving harmful and hard to break.

How do we know this? Because the people who created the tech we crave have acknowledged they designed it that way. Sean Parker, Napster co-founder and former Facebook president, said last November that inventors of systems had a key aim: to consume as much of a user’s time as possible. To that end, they would be given “a little dopamine hit” when someone liked a comment or a photo. Thus encouraged, a user would add more content, get further feel good hits, and so on.

“It is a social-validation feedback loop,” said Parker. “Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you are exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” The inventors, he added, understood this. “And we did it anyway.”

Just as the tech giants put temptation in our way, so we took as much as we could get our hands on. This was the future, and humankind had warmed its hands at the white heat of technology before, had it not? So we handed over our cash, our data, the time we spent with our children, the time they spent with each other outdoors away from screens; whatever it took, we gave it willingly. One cannot argue daylight robbery if you give a burglar a room in your house and all your PIN numbers.

Where we did not expressly hand something over, the contents of newspapers for example, the tech giants took it anyway and sold advertising on the back of other people’s hard work and expenditure.

In all these ways, the tech giants became bigger and bigger. Not too big to fail, like the banks, but too big to scare. Not too big to pay tax, but big enough to shift money round and minimise the bills. Not too big to be accountable (hence those sticky sessions before MPs), but canny enough to have avoided legal responsibility for what they publish.

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It is easy to look at the size and strength of tech giants and feel powerless, but every David can at least try to have his day against Goliath. For governments, that means treating tech giants as what they are, publishers, and making them abide by the same rules and laws as the rest of us in the media. For parents, it means thinking twice about buying that first phone or tablet, and monitoring the use of those already bought. It is a pain in the neck, and will lead to no end of arguments, but the possible gains, be it talking to each other more or keeping children from harm, are immeasurable. For individuals, it means recognising that some things, journalism to the fore, have to be paid for if they are to maintain their worth.

The tech giants are not drinking in the last chance saloon, as a former Minister once said of the press. But they are knocking on the door. When those at the top, as in Davos, start to complain as much as those lower down the influence chain, it is time for the tech giants to change. Or be changed.