The tech “big four” of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google rule our online lives, determining what and who we see, what opinions come our way and what products we buy. Their dominance is down to strategy, ambition and luck – but above all products that keep us coming back for more. Here’s how they did it.
2007: Smartphones
We’d had mobile internet and feature phones before, but Apple’s iPhone was the first true smartphone. Its combination of design and functionality – combining voice calls, messaging, internet access plus a camera to record the world around us – put Big Tech into our pockets as a constant, must-have companion. The first smartphone running Android, the Google-developed operating system, came out a year later.
The price we paid was not just a monthly contract bill, but our data. Through their phones and an ecosystem of apps that work on them, Apple and Google gained access to a wealth of information about our movements and other habits. They use this to improve their services and make them seem even more indispensable – and, in Google’s case, sell advertising to third parties. The cameras proved a source of even more data used to develop more tools such as face recognition, which would in turn keep us buying Big Tech’s products.
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2009: The “Like” button
Facebook developer Justin Rosenstein developed the “Like” button with the stated aim of making interactions on the social network more positive. But a-not-entirely-unintentional side effect was to bind many users closer to Facebook, locked in an obsessional cycle of liking and angling for likes.
In time, Facebook likes became a measure of success not just for individuals, but for companies seeking to reach consumers. Many other sites also incorporated the Facebook “like” button on their own webpages. Whenever anyone clicks such a button that information is relayed back to Facebook, giving it even more data with which to track our web preferences – the better to push targeted advertising at us.
2009: Push notifications
It is easy to dismiss push notifications as annoying messages that pop up on our screens telling us, say, of a new message or Facebook status update. But that’s to underestimate their impact: we are far more likely, for example, to , because we deem the new information to be important.
Push notifications were introduced by Apple for iPhones in 2009, with Google following in its Android operating system in 2010 – guaranteeing that we have been constantly swiping ever since.
2010: Voice assistants
At first glance, for a shopping giant to develop a voice-controlled, intelligent personal assistant might seem a little from the left field. Yet that’s exactly what Amazon did with its assistant Alexa, controlled through the Echo device, first rolled out in 2014. By then, Apple had its own intelligent assistant, Siri, which it bought in 2010 and rolled out in 2011, but Alexa gave Amazon a leg up in the ongoing war for primacy among the Big Tech giants.
By controlling operating systems and search results in our computers and mobile phones, Apple and Google can to some extent influence the products we use and buy – a practice that has got Google into hot water with the European Union for anti-competitive practices. Echo gives Amazon the chance to do the same.
2013: Internet.org
Serving over 2 billion active users with updates from friends, news organisations and other companies – plus, naturally, targeted advertising – Facebook is the access portal to the web for many. Not content with that, in some parts of the globe, the company has been vying since 2013 to actually be the web.
Internet.org, whose app was renamed Free Basics in 2015, is a collaboration between Facebook and six other tech firms to bring affordable internet services to parts of the developing world where they are currently sparse. What Facebook gets out of it is a lot of data about which websites users in those regions visit. But the project has been criticised for violating net neutrality and disadvantaging rival internet services. In 2016, it was forced to withdraw from India.
Facebook isn’t alone in such endeavours: also in 2013, Google first floated its Project Loon, with the goal of using solar-powered, wireless-enabled balloons to beam the web down to remote areas with no internet access.
