Who will take on the behemoths of Big Tech?

With Britain having gone through its third general election in four years, the halcyon days of Cleggmania in the 2010 campaign seem like an impossibly innocent time. Particularly since Sir Nick Clegg, once the shining, soft-haired hope of sensible centrists, now works as a PR man for Facebook. His job is to explain to the unwashed masses why Facebook’s refusal to do anything about false political adverts is actually good for democracy.

Few people believe that any more, but Clegg’s sorry purchase as a useful idiot for the techno-disinformation complex is a vivid illustration of the way that, as this excellent book forensically demonstrates, the big Silicon Valley companies have succeeded in regulatory capture of the US branches of government that ought to oversee them, as well as more generally in ‘cognitive capture’ of the public conversation about the changes they are forcing upon the world.

Google is the single biggest political lobbyist in the US, but also sprays money at the academics who study internet law and culture, and who — as though coincidentally — come up with theories friendly to Google. Google and its corporate comrades have also, Rana Foroohar shows, succeeded in weakening patent-protection laws, which is good for them — because their business depends on copying the ideas of new startups — but bad for everyone else. Many experts quoted here say the result has been to stifle innovation, not only in the computer industry but in fields such as biotech as well.

Indeed, though bookshop shelves are groaning with excitable trade books about how the pace of change in modern life is unprecedented, very little has changed technologically in more than a decade. Smartphones are still basically the same devices as the first iPhone in 2007, and Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are still the entrenched incumbents, while newer tech ‘unicorns’ are falling by the wayside: witness the abandoned IPO this summer of the office-rental company WeWork.