Perils of Digitalisation: In 2021, Big Tech may have gotten too big

A new year is approaching and, thanks to the pandemic, brings with it the prospect of New Year's Eve celebrations built around the video calls and digital health passes that became a norm in 2021"A lot of these technologies were initially adopted at a time when we thought this was a short emergency," Frederike Kaltheuner, tech policy analyst and Director of the European AI Fund, a philanthropic initiative focused on shaping the role of artificial intelligence in Europe, told DW. "And I think 2022 is the year we're going to realise that this isn't really going away." In practice, this means that, while lockdowns and tangled supply chains weighed on the retail, service and industry sectors, Big Tech players reported record profits and continued to grow. From tech hardware to digital advertising to self-driving cars, during the pandemic Silicon Valley giants like Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have moved further into each other's turf. This is according to Alexander Fanta, an EU tech policy journalist for netzpolitik, a German news outlet that covers the digital sphere. "The power of these companies is that they're so multidimensional. They corner different markets and then leverage the power gained from one market to dominate another," he told DW.