How Big Tech turns knowledge into power
By Cecilia Rikap
Those famous images that went around the world: Sundar Pichai (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) occupying places of honour at the inauguration of Donald Trump's second presidency. Power with a capital “P." Their dominance over contemporary capitalism needs to be explained. It is not merely a matter of influence through lobbying or shrewd whispering in the ears of rulers, nor is it only about having the deepest pockets on Earth and what their money can buy.
The new masters exert their power through a tight control over the production of knowledge. From their platforms and clouds, they structure how knowledge is generated, distributed, and validated. Their dominance is not just economic but also epistemological: they shape what gets researched, how it is researched, and what is accepted as truth. In this regime, the illusion of knowledge and information being democratized through the internet and platforms hides the reality that the key intangibles which govern our society are the controlled assets of a corporate minority.
Big Tech shares with other leading corporations today that they are intellectual monopolies, firms that dominate through control over intangible assets like patents, software, and data. While older intellectual monopolists such as IBM systematically concentrated intangibles based mostly on their internal development, today’s intellectual monopolies build transnational corporate innovation systems. Within these networks, knowledge is co-produced by thousands of organizations, but it is disproportionately directed and captured by intellectual monopolies.
A way to provide evidence of knowledge predation is to compare the share of a lead firm’s co-authored scientific publications to its share of co-owned patents with other organizations. Despite establishing hundreds of research collaborations, as shown by data on scientific co-authorships, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and Tencent only shared ownership of up to 0.3 per cent of their patents with other organisations between 2014 and 2019. For instance, Microsoft has co-authored 88 per cent of its publications with other organizations but only co-owns 0.1 per cent of its patents with others.
While knowledge predation is common to every intellectual monopoly today, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have emerged as dominant powers above all the other leading corporations, including other Big Tech firms, by dominating the cloud. Together, they concentrated around 65 per cent of the world’s public cloud business. Their clouds provide the global infrastructure on which other businesses, institutions and even governments increasingly depend. These are more than physical infrastructure for the digital age; their public clouds are the space where production, exchange and consumption of digital technologies takes place.
These three cloud giants extract value by renting access to cloud services that go from computing power to AI models, databases, analytics tools, and developer platforms. Access to these services is subscription-based and usage-dependent, creating a lucrative stream of rents with minimal marginal cost. Clients neither own nor get access to the tools they use; they rent the conditions of innovation, often without access to the source code or underlying data.
The cloud architecture is designed for lock-in. Services and tools are modular, interdependent, and non-portable. Companies that build their systems within one cloud find it prohibitively expensive and technically challenging to migrate elsewhere. Even adopting a “multi-cloud” strategy - splitting services among providers - does not escape this dependency, since Amazon, Microsoft, and Google deliberately prevent seamless interoperability. Cloud clients become tenants in a privately owned digital economy, one increasingly shaped by Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s rules and policies.
As more companies adopt cloud-based systems, the panoptic power of these giants grows. They have an unparalleled view of the digital consumption of thousands of firms, enabling them to make inferences about these firms’ businesses and even innovation strategies.
Generative AI is putting additional pressure to migrate to their clouds; a pressure that is also felt by other leading corporations. Generative AI tools are now used by every lead firm to sustain its dominance and expand intellectual monopolies over pharmaceuticals, fashion, finance and media industries.
However, the tools they rent from the cloud giants are generally black boxes which limit their capacity to learn by doing, using and interacting with the technology. AI technologies are also reshaping creative labour inside leading corporations and within their corporate innovation systems. Even Microsoft has recognized that reliance on generative AI outputs diminishes critical thinking, as workers shift from problem-solving and other creative duties to mere fact-checking.
This has deep implications for knowledge production globally. As AI-generated knowledge becomes dominant, alternative approaches are pushed aside. A single epistemological model - data-driven, algorithmically governed, and cloud-based - becomes hegemonic. This centralization of knowledge and control reinforces cloud giants’ intellectual monopolization across sectors, for example in healthcare.
Leading corporations also adopt digital technologies, offered as cloud services, to organize the workplace inside their offices and in the value chains that they dominate. Digital technologies are control technologies. They allow leading corporations to monitor, plan, and adjust operations across vast networks of suppliers, subsidiaries, and partners. Unlike traditional corporate planning which is confined within firm boundaries, cloud-based tools allow planning without ownership. Dashboards fuelled by real-time metrics allow algorithmic oversight of supply chains, labour, and customer engagement. Cloud-rented digital technology does not just support business—it directs it.
This construction gives cloud hegemons a quasi-sovereign position in the global economy. They set the technical and economic rules that others must follow. Their algorithms and other technologies act as governance mechanisms. Even states - once regulators - are now clients, integrating cloud services into their everyday operations. This is not capitalism seeking freedom from law, as some claim, but a form of private regulation by those who can see, shape, and control economic life at a planetary scale.
This current model is the result of private, for-profit choices, not technological destiny. The coalition formed by the US government and Big Tech creates the necessity to go from regulation and other forms of resistance to prefiguring an alternative, which is to reclaim democratic and ecological digital sovereignty. This would require ambitious public investment and international coordination. States must go beyond regulating AI and actively participate in developing digital technologies independent from Big Tech’s control.
Such an alternative future for digital technologies should not represent an advancement in states’ surveillance and undemocratic control. This is why it must be based on democratic participation, common ownership, and open collaboration.
In public hands and run as a commons - rather than controlled by corporations for their private profit - digital technologies could support collective intelligence and democratic planning for addressing today’s main challenges, from the ecological crisis to mounting inequalities.
Cecilia Rikap is an Associate Professor of Economics at University College London in the UK and Head of Research at UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.