By Tim Christiaens, Assistant Professor of Economic Ethics and Philosophy, Tilburg University (Netherlands)

Big Tech corporations and their products have infiltrated nearly every aspect of our everyday lives, from Apple smartphones to Amazon grocery deliveries and from OpenAI’s ChatGPT (and its many competitors) to Meta’s recently launched smart glasses. The pace at which this infiltration is happening is accelerating: a handful of American tech firms have colonised our lifeworld and there is almost no island of refuge left.

Most recent books on AI and Big Tech domination explore how Silicon Valley dominates workers, consumers, and/or governments. Exemplary publications by, among others, Kate Crawford, James Muldoon, Shoshana Zuboff, and Cathy O’Neil have built the genre. But in The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud, Cecilia Rikap shows the type of corporate domination underlying these news stories. A crucial gap about AI and Big Tech is how tech corporations exert control over other businesses to expand their corporate empire. We still often think about “big corporations” through the lens of Fordist monopoly capitalism, when businesses would dominate markets through vertical integration. One company then tries to own and control all elements in its supply chain. Such businesses grow by reinvesting profits in their own self-expansion, by acquiring competing smaller firms, and by managing internal research labs to establish R&D that keep competitors out of the race.

The rise of intellectual monopolies

Today’s networked capitalism, however, no longer favours vertically integrated firms. It prefers more nimble companies that coordinate an assemblage of subordinate yet nominally independent organisations. Big Tech establishes its monopolistic hold over everyday life not by growing one single corporation, but by managing an extended universe of supposedly autonomous organisations. Just like you might watch different Marvel movies which are all in fact the same Disney-owned intellectual property, you can have seemingly separate interactions with Google, YouTube, an AI ethics department at an American Ivy League University and your local municipal government, without knowing that these are all different faces of the same Alphabet extended universe.

Tech companies today generate power from controlling so-called “intangible capital” without necessarily owning it. This capital constitutes data assets, brand reputation, intellectual property, software applications, cloud infrastructures, and so on.

Tech companies today generate power from controlling so-called “intangible capital” without necessarily owning it. This capital constitutes data assets, brand reputation, intellectual property, software applications, cloud infrastructures, and so on. Apple, for example, owns the underlying software to run apps on its iPhones and carefully manages the supply of apps in its Appstore, but it does not produce or operate most apps. The latter are marketed by external companies, nominally separate from Apple, but also deeply dependent on Apple’s goodwill to host these apps on its hard- and software. Rikap identifies these constructions as “intellectual monopolies” under two conditions.

Innovation networks, surveillance and chokepoints

Firstly, lead firms – like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft or Alphabet – must coordinate networks of subordinate organisations that generate knowledge from which they extract rent, like Apple taking commissions from its Appstore. The practice is widespread, according to Rikap. By financing start-ups with venture capital, for example, Big Tech builds an ecosystem of innovation machines under its control. Uber has invested in over 30 autonomous vehicle companies to ensure an early foothold in the market for self-driving cars, for example. By funding research on AI development and ethics, Big Tech influences large parts of academia. Anthropic famously employs its own philosopher to influence the academic debate on AI consciousness, but tech companies also channel direct funding to universities doing AI ethics in “Big Tech”-friendly ways. Even governments are often obliged to use Big Tech’s cloud technology for its own services. Google publicly advertises how the UK government uses its cloud services for the NHS, the Department for Transport, and the Office for National Statistics. Ultimately, an intellectual monopoly assembles a loose network of subordinate institutions that pursue their interests by relying on the monopolist’s support.

Secondly, Big Tech’s hold over intangible capital generates two forms of power. It fosters surveillance power insofar as the lead firm assembles data from across its network to monitor and analyse vast populations. Amazon infamously tracks sales statistics on its retail website to determine which products from other businesses it must imitate and sell itself. But intellectual monopolies also control critical chokepoints in social life, which grants them leverage over other organisations and consumers. For instance, TSMC controls the production of microchips so extensively that it can pressure clients into paying monopoly rents.

Can Big Tech be challenged?

Antonio Gramsci defined “hegemony” by stating that some social classes wield power not by forcing other classes into obedience but by persuading them that acting according to the hegemon’s will is in their own advantage. Likewise, Big Tech establishes hegemony over its extended universe by convincing other organisations that subordinating themselves to Big Tech is necessary to pursue their own goals. Start-ups, academics, governments, and other businesses end up in unequal exchange relationships where they must sacrifice their autonomy to procure their interests.

Measures like enforcing free-market competition, regulation, or breaking up companies usually fail because the Big Tech cloud is too agile and nebulous to be captured by government rules.

Rikap’s book brilliantly sets out the stakes of political economy today. She shows how the traditional approaches to tame Big Tech cannot work if they fail to tackle intellectual monopolism. Measures like enforcing free-market competition, regulation or breaking up companies – like the EU sometimes tries to enforce – usually fail because the Big Tech cloud is too agile and nebulous to be captured by government rules. Moreover, the regulators themselves have become vulnerably dependent subordinates in Big Tech’s global ecosystem. How can, for example, the UK government be expected to regulate Google if the NHS stores its data on Google’s cloud? Only more radical solutions will suffice, according to Rikap. Government must completely decouple from Big Tech to establish digital sovereignty, academics must protect AI research independent from business interests, and democratic economic planning must break the surveillance and chokepoint power of big corporations. Technological development must become a matter of democratic deliberation.

These answers sound utopian and they unfortunately come at the end of a book that documents precisely how tight the hold of Big Tech on global politics has become. If the space of politics is entirely captured by intellectual monopoly capitalism, it is hard to see where the push for digital popular sovereignty will come from. Rikap’s book is arguable best paired with Nick Srnicek’s Silicon Empires (2026) and Trebor Scholz’s Own This! How Platform Cooperatives Help Build a Democratic Internet (2023). Both books highlight the fragility in Big Tech’s global empire, the cracks in the system, and how social movements have exploited these weaknesses to construct more democratic alternatives. After reading Rikap’s formidable book on the rulers of this world, it seems clear that intellectual monopoly capitalism will not die a natural death.

Tim Christiaens is Assistant Professor of Economic Ethics and Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.