[twoodfin]

Big Tech today is far more powerful than 1990s Microsoft and 1970s IBM ever were.

In aggregate, sure, but no company today comes within an order of magnitude of the power an IBM of the ‘70s and ‘80s or a Microsoft of the ‘90s and ‘00s had over the tech landscape.

[linguae]

1970s IBM and 1990s Microsoft were formidable monopolies, but I was thinking in lines of influence over society and not necessarily in terms of market share. The consequences of social media and centralized Web services are much more impactful on society, for better and for worse, than dominance over 1970s mainframes and 1990s desktop operating systems, Web browsers, and office suites.

[mhh__]

Probably true but what was tech is now basically just the entire economy.

[xorcist]

That power isn't even a rounding error compared to their power today. In those decades you had commercial dominance over a niche sector. Today you play kingmaker together with the other oligarchs.

Big Tech today is the media. Taken together, they completely control what a majority of the populace knows about the world. It is considered completely impractical and somewhat suspicious not to carry one of their location tracking communication devices at all times.

Orwell's Ministry of Truth could not dream of what Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI and Apple can do at any time, anywhere.