Introduction

Abstract

Today, digital personal data has become the defining resource for our societies and economies. Unfortunately, our personal data are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of digital technology businesses often called Big Tech. The past decade has been defined by the rise of Big Tech as the dominant social players in our societies, and much of their rise and dominance is down to their control over our personal data. Big Tech has created a series of data enclaves that entrench their power and dominance, limiting the capacity of other businesses to compete in technoscientific capitalism. In building their data enclaves, Big Tech has engaged in a parasitic form of innovation, developing digital technologies designed to limit access to resources, to undermine regulations or social conventions, to undermine or avoid competition, to exploit customers psychology, to lock customers into using a product, to stop customers fixing their own property, or to use information asymmetries to treat customers inequitably. The contention of this book is that we need to rethink data governance in order to address the growing paradoxes and problems engendered by the market and social power of Big Tech.