Big Tech’s Affordability Fight is Finally Here
As tech companies came under withering scrutiny at the height of the techlash, one defense giants like Google and Meta deployed to beat back claims of harm was that their most widely used products didn’t cost people a dime.
These behemoths still found ways to make their fortunes, but they largely did so on the back of free services billions of people used. And when these companies got in trouble politically — for antitrust and privacy concerns — they pointed to their cost-free services as a foil.
Google prominently featured the free nature of its ubiquitous search engine while fending off federal antitrust lawsuits in the United States. Facebook pushed back on criticisms that its data collection practices were too invasive by making policymakers question whether the world would be better off if it charged people for access. Personalized advertising, the company wrote in a blog post as it stared down new regulatory guardrails in Europe, “will always be the cornerstone of a free and inclusive internet.”
Information wants to be free, tech executives defiantly argued in the lexicon of the internet age, and they had ensured it was. For years, that helped make the topic of affordability one of Big Tech’s most effective shields.
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