Have you ever wondered what the world would be like without a local car wash? A gas station, a grocery store, a general store? All of these are examples of small businesses. Small businesses and their owners are the foundation of America and our economy. They allow our country to thrive and allow consumers to get what they want. Today, technology startups are a huge modern form of small business. They create new products, websites, and tools that make our lives even easier every single day. I myself have started my own business called “Ryno Pc”, and have made money, but like many other tech startups, I have no path to continue on. In the past fifteen years, tech startups' success rate has started to get worse and worse. This is a huge problem for consumers and small business owners in the industry. In order for consumers to win and not overpay for products, there needs to be competition for companies so that it forces them to make better and more affordable products. Lately, it has been the opposite, but how are they doing this, and why is this happening?

How do big tech companies stay at the top of the food chain? The answer is not that simple. To dumb it down, the big tech companies create products that cost way less than they are sold for, then they sell them for rediculous prices. Then, their users that are already hooked into that ecosystem of technology are sort of forced to stay with the same company because if they leave that ecosystem, they will need to start all over again with all of their information etc. wiped. This along with the data that big tech companies keep on you make it very hard for other businesses to try and compete and get customers to pull away from big tech companies. “The tech giants are also growing by snapping up potential rivals that might threaten market share. Data compiled by Bloomberg show the big five -- Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft -- have made 431 acquisitions worth $155.7 billion over the last decade. The companies also have control over vast amounts of data about their customers, raising concerns about threats to privacy”(McLaughlin). The reason that your data is so important to these tech companies is that they now know what you look up, what you want to buy, politicians you are interested in, and nearly everything there is to find about you. This data is extremely valuable because they now know everything about you, when someone knows everything about you they know what to advertise towards you, what you are vulnerable to, and how they might be able to upsell services to you, etc. Now take the small business, maybe they are able to afford an ad on YouTube on a small YouTube channel. Here is the catch, they don't have any of your data, if the big tech did not hog it all, they might be able to market their business to a specific group of users that would be more likely to buy their product. But they don't have that data so their advertising is nearly useless. All of these problems linked together create a never ending monopoly of superpowers in the computer business that will control it forever until something is done about it.

If these big tech companies are monopolizing the space and making it impossible for smaller competitors to get into the market, why isn't the government trying to do something about this? An MIT technology review states, “US regulators are seriously questioning whether companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have too much power. This new push to curb the might of Big Tech has a catchy solution: break up the companies. But a breakup will be hard to force, and the history of trustbusting suggests that many other solutions are possible” (Chen). In short, the statement above talks about is that breaking up big tech could not only be extremely hard but actually very dangerous for the economy and other markets. This can happen for a variety of reasons, some including, if you break up what the company has bought, stocks in the companies can crash because they might not have as much power as they used to, the breaks could really screw things up for the businesses because sometimes the other companies they own collaborate with their own company and if that service was gone there might not be a need for the parent company anymore. This problem along with other problems make ‘tech’ a very complicated space, also making it extremely hard for the government to place any restrictions on the big tech companies behind the monopolies. While there may be no simple solution, that doesn’t mean there are no solutions at all.

Solutions may not be instant, but there are a lot of interesting ones that might be able to solve the problem gradually. A quick solution that users may not be too happy with is making big tech companies share their data with smaller companies. This would solve many problems for small startup businesses trying to get into the tech market. This would allow two main things to happen: This would one, allow the very small tech startups to have a chance to make their advertising much more effective than it was before and this would make it so they are able to reach their audience and users, without spending huge amounts of money they don't have. Also, this allows tech startups with really good ideas to use mass data in order to make their programs stronger and better. For example, in order for someone's AI software and or their algorithm to work, they are going to need huge amounts of data (mass data). This allows them to actually make their AI or algorithm to actually work the way it was intended to, and the tech startup is actually able to offer a working service to users. This also allows them to make their AI or algorithm much more efficient because they will be able to see the bottlenecks in their code or neural networks. Just this solution alone is very valid and would be extremely helpful to all tech-startups trying to get off the ground. 

A solution that should be in place right now above all, is making it so tech companies can't “Lock” you in to their ecosystem. For example, Apple makes it impossible for you to switch your data and everything on your phone to an android phone, yet, they make it if you get a new iPhone, you can place it next to your own and within a minute everything is transferred over. Not only this but within Apple software, they discriminate against android users texting an iPhone user, creating group chats with an android user and much more. From an ethical standpoint, these companies are not being ethical to their users and they are just trying to take in as much money as possible. As it's said in the book Business and Ethics, “Unethical behaviors hurt other people, or make their lives harder”(Madrian). If tech companies are not allowed to do this, customers have the freedom to go to any company they want and this would bring new competitors with better prices into the market. This is why Apple is able to sell a 1200 dollar phone to consumers that really should cost around 400 dollars. This is yet again another unethical behavior used by many big tech companies, making it harder for people to get what they want, and making them pay ridiculous amounts of money for a cheap product. Stopping these ‘lock ins’ is key to making the technology space a fair market again. Doing this would help businesses grow, and let consumers get what they want at competitive prices.

Small businesses are the foundation of America, and are the basis of the American Dream. As of right now, it is not possible for many Americans to start their business in this day and age. We as a country need to fix this, innovation is what has driven America to the top, and where it is today, a world superpower. What is America without innovation? There is no Henry Ford, there is no Albert Einstein, instead, we would live in a country where there is no innovating, no competing, and no hope of accomplishing our American Dreams.

Works Cited

Chen, Angela. "How to Regulate Big Tech without Breaking It up." MIT Technology Review, 7 June 2019, www.technologyreview.com/s/613640/big-tech-monopoly-breakup-amazon-apple-facebook-google-regulation-policy/. Accessed 9 Sept. 2019.

Madrian, Brigitte. Business & Ethics. Broomall, Mason Crest.

McLaughlin, David. "Did Big Tech Get Too Big? More of the World Is Asking." The Washington Post, Washington Post, 26 July 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/business/did-big-tech-get-too-big-more-of-the-world-is-asking/2019/07/26/eb98bf2e-afb1-11e9-9411-a608f9d0c2d3_story.html. Accessed 8 Oct. 2019.