Oversize #30: Understanding Biden’s campaign on Big Tech

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Editor's note: Last year, Apple made Wall Street history, becoming the first American company to be valued at $2 trillion. In June, Microsoft followed suit as just the second US public company to trade at such a market value. Behind Apple and Microsoft, the other tech majors just short of the mark include Amazon at about $1.8 trillion and Alphabet at around a $1.6 trillion market cap. I’ll throw in another number to get the point about the sheer bonkers-ness of Big Tech across. The current stock market value of the top five technology titans ($9.3 trillion)—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook—is more than the value of the next 27 most valuable American companies put together. Big Tech was already huge before the COVID-19 crisis, and the pandemic has only made them bigger. A lot bigger. I did write about the Big Tech getting bigger as the world shrank a few months ago. And it goes beyond dollars. These organizations are increasingly deeper stakeholders in the everyday lives of billions of humans, diverse businesses across the globe, as well as governments and …