The Lords of Big Tech rule over the information landscape with all the cruelty and capriciousness of a feudal King. Just like those feudal Kings of Britain’s long ago past who controlled every aspect of the lives of ‘their’ peasants, the Lords of Big Tech control the vast majority of everything you see, hear, watch and experience online. The Lords of Big Tech control what you can say, what you can show, what opinions you can express and what platforms you can access. They can unperson an individual with the click of a mouse. They can control what search results that you get from a search engine.

Such power and the ability to control has had dire consequences for the information ecosystem. We now have an information ecosystem that is not balanced, where certain opinions or viewpoints are banned and where the heirs of one of the worst ideologies in human history, socialism, are wield the ‘banhammer’ and use it often.

In Britain we once had a situation where the power of Kings was untrammelled and unrestricted. British subjects, or rather as I should say English subjects as Britain as an entity did not come into existence until hundreds of years after feudalism ended, did not just owe and give loyalty to Kings but were owned by them as property is owned. It was only with the signing of Magna Carta that the power of Kings started to be reduced and spread about, first to the Barons, then eventually to the middle classes and finally, via universal suffrage, to every single British subject.

For too long the Lords of Big Tech have behaved like unrestricted English Kings, deciding, without the input of others who may not think the same as them, who will be allowed to speak and who will not. We are not users or customers of the services that these Lords of Big Tech run, we are merely the serfs who can be dispensed with at will by the Lords.

However, there are signs that things may be changing. We may be seeing the beginnings of a Magna Carta for Big Tech and in my opinion it is something that cannot come a moment too soon.

According to a report by Reclaim the Net, the US Department of Justice has filed an Anti Trust lawsuit against Google following a lengthy investigation. The US DOJ is NOT ruling out a future enforced break up of Google in order to reduce its anti-competitive market dominance.

Reclaim the Net said:

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has sued Google (with Alphabet as parent company) on antitrust grounds, claiming that the global giant uses its unprecedented position and power in the market to stifle competition.

Attorney-generals from the ranks of the Republican Party in 11 states – Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina and Texas – joined the lawsuit that goes into great detail to expose the heart of Google’s extremely lucrative ad-based business.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The authors of the lawsuit chose accurate-sounding yet damning language to describe Google’s grip over the industry, calling it “the gatekeeper of the internet.” The accusation is that Google uses its Search service to amass billions in revenue from selling ads (useful to third parties who pay for them only if the tech giant also provides massive datasets containing personal information collected from users).

The extent of Google’s dominance in the search segment (outside of China, where it is banned, and Russia, where it’s facing viable home-grown competition) is staggering: the filing deals with some figures and in the US alone, the market share the behemoth has is 80 percent on the desktop and as much as 94 percent on the mobile.

The latter is where Google Search is tightly paired not only with Android phones, but also with devices and services of other giants like Apple, Samsung, AT&T, Verizon, Mozilla and others, who collectively get paid billions to keep Google Search as their default.

The ad revenue Google collects each year in this way reaches $40 billion, the document said.

The vast wealth accrued in this way is then used as a stranglehold against the rest of the market, the lawsuit alleges, efficiently preventing competition from any chance of challenging this monopoly. As a result, users are unable to benefit from any innovation that might otherwise stem from true competition.

The way the authors of the lawsuit, which came after an investigation that took 16 months to complete, want the court to remedy the situation is by “entering ‘structural relief’ against any parties harmed” and end to “antitrust ‘agreements’.

This is interpreted to mean that the DoJ is not ruling out the necessity of eventually breaking Google up.

This is in my view a very welcome move but is also one that should be aimed at other companies run by the almost untouchable Tech Lords as well such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter. The behaviour of these platforms has been less than optimal when it comes to protecting freedom of speech. Facebook has been at the centre of numerous scandals regarding censorship and Twitter has as well.

This case being brought by the US DOJ is in my view both very welcome and very necessary. It’s a good start to taming the Lords of Big Tech, but much much more needs to be done to tame them completely and return to a free and open internet with free and open competition between service providers.