“Surveillance capitalism” is no longer seen as exploitative, but essential to beat the covid-19 pandemic
will have many losers, but it already has one clear winner: big tech. The large digital platforms, including Alphabet and Facebook, will come out of the crisis even stronger. They should use this good fortune to reset their sometimes testy relations with their users. Otherwise big government, the other beneficiary of the covid calamity, is likely to do it for them.
Facebook has said that messaging activity has increased by 50% in those countries hit hard by the virus. Amazon is planning to hire 100,000 new staff to keep up with higher e-commerce orders. The big tech firms are also a bastion of financial stability: together Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have $570bn of gross cash on their balance-sheets. Shares in these firms have outperformed the market since late January.
If that happens, the odds are that regulators will do little or nothing to stop a round of consolidation. In America antitrust investigations against Alphabet, Google’s parent, and Facebook have essentially been put on hold, as officials deal with other priorities and refrain from destabilising firms during a crisis. A new federal privacy law seems further away than ever. Even tech sceptics in the European Union want to rethink their approach to regulating artificial intelligence .
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