big tech

The term big business has led to a related set of big words such as big tobacco, big pharma, and big sugar.  It is interesting that in all these cases we give this name to businesses that are under fire for bad behaviour.  So it is not surprising that this year there has been a fairly relentless pressure on big tech, the major technology companies usually listed as Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, whose power and influence is enormous and who show little sign of bowing to public pressure to improve their practices. In particular Facebook is being asked to control the extremist groups who set up in their system and pass highly offensive material or utterly false information around.