The World in the Hands of Four Tech Giants | Technologies

Last Friday’s computer outage exposed a startling reality: In the digital age, the world depends on a handful of big tech companies. If just one of them goes down, the system collapses. In this case, the problem caused by Falcon CrowdStrike antivirus…

Last Friday’s computer outage exposed a startling reality: In the digital age, the world depends on a handful of big tech companies. If just one of them goes down, the system collapses. This time, the problem, caused by Falcon CrowdStrike, affected just 1% of Windows users (about 8.5 million computers). That was enough to wreak havoc at airports around the planet, canceling more than 5,000 flights; disrupt hospitals; or paralyze electronic payment systems.

Microsoft is one of the key links in the system, as became clear last week. But it’s not the only one. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, and Apple round out the Olympus of what we might call systemic tech companies: without them, we wouldn’t be able to use any of our devices, personal or professional. These four giants, which are also the world’s largest companies by market capitalization (with credit to chipmaker Nvidia, in third place), control two critical bottlenecks for everything to work: operating systems (the basic software that enables other software, like antivirus software, to run) and cloud computing (the physical infrastructure that stores and computes the data we upload to the internet).

There are other factors that will take everything with them if things go wrong. Here, for example, telecom operators who install antennas, cables and satellites, or manufacturers can come to the rescue Hardware (cars). However software It is in the hands of a few. “Last week’s incident showed us that there are three main bottlenecks: endpoint protection systems (in this case Falcon CrowdStrike); operating systems, dominated by Microsoft; and interaction with the cloud,” says David Arroyo Guardeño, principal researcher at CSIC’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection Group. “By playing with these three parts, we can better respond to future challenges. For example, betting on a hybrid cloud that combines several providers. But in practice, this is not happening.”

Technological oligopolies

The original promise of the Internet was decentralization. In the early years of the network, users had a lot of autonomy. Content was shared, sometimes in conflict with copyright. But little by little, the range of possibilities narrowed. For many years now, most users “go” to the Internet through private applications, usually social networks. YouTube, Amazon or TikTok do not only offer entertainment: they are increasingly used as search engines.

But let’s take it one piece at a time. He software The most important thing in any device, the one that makes everything work, is its operating system. Microsoft dominates the computer operating system market with an iron fist. According to StatCounter, it is present in 72.8% of machines. OS X, the Apple alternative, is very far behind, at almost 15%. The rest belongs to Linux (4%) and other smaller providers.

If we look at mobile phones, the devices that most of humanity uses to surf the web (56% of internet users, according to Statista), Google’s Android is dominant. It runs on 72% of smartphones. It’s followed by Apple’s iOS with a market share of 27%.

So-called cloud computing allows us to run programs on the Internet from our devices (i.e. without storing data on our computer or mobile phone, or dedicating computing power to it). The cloud is not ethereal at all: rather, it is a vast network of data centers filled with servers running 24/7 so that users can access their banking app, book a flight, shop, or check their email.

Two of the previous companies are reclaiming control over these key infrastructures, but another one is joining the party as the industry leader. AWS (Amazon Web Services) leads the market with a 31% share, followed by Microsoft Azure (25%) and Google Cloud (11%). These three giants own two-thirds of the structure that allows companies to develop their products and services on the Internet.

Why such concentration?

How did we get to this point of dependence on just a few companies? “I see it as a feedback loop. First, they offer you basic and free services, like email or a search engine,” begins Ekaitz Cancela, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Internet Institute (IN3) of the Open University of Catalonia and author Digital Utopias

(Books of Poetry, 2023) Based on the data these companies collect from their users, they build their advertising personalization models, with the help of which they have dominated the global advertising market for many years.

“They now use this data to train AI models that they use in cloud services and then offer to administrations. So they are in an ideal position to manage the security systems of countries,” he concludes. According to a study published Technical requestSince 2016, Microsoft has signed more than 5,000 contracts with the U.S. military, Amazon has more than 350 similar agreements, and Google has another 250. Just two years ago, in 2022, the Pentagon awarded Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle a lucrative $9 billion mega-contract to develop a cloud computing project. Tech giants not only control the systems we need to work, play, run a business, or perform administrative tasks: They also have a presence in the military arena.

Both operating system providers and cloud computing managers operate in oligopolies. “Obviously, oligopolies cannot be tolerated, the question is how to avoid them,” says Manuel Alejandro Hidalgo, a professor at Pablo de Olavide University and an economist at EsadeEcPol. “It seems that the US has lost momentum in the fight against oligopolies. If this is done, the processes could be very complex, because the value of some of these companies is equal to or greater than the GDP of many countries.” The four big tech companies mentioned above command stratospheric numbers. Apple, for example, has a market value more than twice that of Spain.

Alternative

“Why are we immersed in a digital economy where, to find a restaurant to have dinner tonight in Barcelona, ​​I have to go to a search engine run by an American company that has servers in Mountain View?” he asks. “The first thing to think about is why the Internet is so centralized. Our hospitals and airports are constantly connected and therefore vulnerable because they depend on services from foreign companies. Why don’t we have local servers in hospitals?”

The solution may come through regulation. Although Microsoft has already hinted that the crisis last week is linked to EU interventionism, citing an agreement the multinational reached with Brussels in 2009 to halt an investigation into abuse of its dominant market position in the systems. The investigation was halted if Microsoft provided technical details so that other companies, such as CrowdStrike, could develop software Windows Compatibility: “We’ll soon start hearing big tech companies arguing that deregulation is the key to national security,” adds Cancela.

Is there an alternative to the dominance of Big Tech? “The only way out is to reduce the administration’s dependence on Silicon Valley,” the researcher says. This means relying on open operating systems such as Linux, which is already being done in some countries, and developing software be hosted on local servers, eliminating the need for a constant Internet connection.

The EU is aware of Europe’s technological vulnerability. Hence the Gaia-X project, which aims for digital autonomy and the development of its own cloud. But reality is stubborn. “To develop it, agreements have been signed with large tech companies. Even the EU adopted Oracle’s cloud two months ago,” says Javier Sánchez Monedero, Beatriz Galindo’s researcher in artificial intelligence at the Faculty of Computer Science and Numerical Analysis at the University of Córdoba. “The network is completely resilient, the Internet is designed to work in a decentralized and federated way. What is unsustainable is that on top of that there is a layer with three or four products to which everything is delegated.”

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