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On Technology

Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful? That’s an Easy One

Credit...Illustration by Jon Han

In start-up lore, no figure is more venerated than the tech-world founder. No mere entrepreneur, the founder is unique, sitting above the categories other people might use to order the society around them. In fact, the personage is cast as a sort of revolutionary, proposing big solutions to questions nobody else is even thinking to ask — less often because the questions are too complicated or obscure than because they’re too obvious, too expansive.

In a widely read 2005 essay, Paul Graham, a founder of the start-up incubator Y Combinator and the closest thing the start-up world has to a pre-eminent guru, shared his big idea about ideas: Many of the best ones are questions. “A few grammatical tweaks,” he writes, “and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.” And many of the best questions are ones that might seem insoluble at first blush. “I found spam intolerable, and I felt it had to be possible to recognize it statistically,” Graham says of his own work. “And it turns out that was all you needed to solve the problem.” The recipe for good questions, he goes on, is simple: “finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it.”

The easy question is a common start-up origin story: One day, the founder asks, “Why can’t I?” before going on to figure out, though hard work, that he or she actually can. According to Reed Hastings, the question that started Netflix was: Why don’t video stores offer flat membership fees the way health clubs do? Indeed, the stories of many tech giants can be told through the big question they eventually answered. Google: Why isn’t there a good way to rank search results? Facebook: Why aren’t social networks connecting people with real names? Uber: Why can’t I use an app to summon a taxi? Twitter: Why isn’t there a dead-simple way to just publish whatever you want for a gathered audience? In real life, each of these companies had more sinuous origins, with dead ends and discarded ideas. But their successes are easier to grasp when understood in retrospect as complicated answers to big, obvious questions — questions that, once heard, made sense to millions of people.

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Credit...Illustration by Jon Han

In 2018, founders have been questioning matters far bigger than search results or video stores: about politics, about culture and about how the world might be reordered in much more radical ways. Most recently, however, the case for “just asking questions” — for finding a problem intolerable and believing there must be some way to fix it — has proved remarkably well suited for a fresh purpose: challenging the tech companies themselves.

In political terms, the dominant tech companies have settled into a sort of permanent revolution. If they were founded to address an easy question, that question has either been answered and forgotten or repeated enough times to convert it into an odd, self-justifying ideology. (See: Facebook’s “Connecting the world.”) The questions became companies, which then, mostly without explicitly deciding to, became institutions. And now, for anyone affected by the tech industry, the most obvious and important questions are about the world that these companies are making.

The first easy question to ask of the big tech companies: What are they, really? Certainly not what they tell consumers they are. Twitter and Facebook are not merely places to hang out with or meet people, or competitors with the news media, but entirely new forms of discourse built around centralized advertising marketplaces. Uber is not a car company but an attempt to build a new private transit layer over the places in which it operates. Amazon is not a competitor to bookstores or brick-and-mortar retail — or even a store of any kind — but a new logistical model for the exchange and transport of goods, media and services.

This leads to other obvious questions. How does Facebook make money while connecting the world? (Many, many ways, most of which involve advertising transactions in which users have a passive role.) How does Facebook decide what to show me next? (Using many “signals” and algorithms that you’ll just have to trust were written to show you what’s most relevant.) How does Twitter decide which users are suspended as it recreates public discourse? (According to inconsistently enforced rules and with the help of a large, invisible contract labor force.) Are Uber drivers employees? (Strictly speaking, no.)

Other questions are more technical. An easy question with a hard answer: Who owns the content I upload to Instagram? (You do — except you have granted Instagram a license to use it for almost any purpose.) Is Instagram listening to me? Because these ads are kind of creeping me out. (No, but the company partners with other firms that collect information about your online behavior, so if for instance you talked about something, then searched for it on your phone in a different app, maybe it could end up helping Instagram serve an ad, so, well, yes, but not literally, no, it is not listening to your spoken words.) O.K., then, what about my Echo — is my Amazon Echo always listening to me? (No — well, only so it can hear when you say “Alexa.” So, yes?) So is my Echo listening when, for example, I’m having sex? (Again, no, only for the word “Alexa,” so, well, actually yes.)

The companies most vulnerable to easy questions tend to be the ones that can no longer be understood in terms of former competitors or current peers — because they don’t really have any. Google doesn’t have to worry about losing its users; it simply wants them to use Google more and to use more Google products. Vindicated by growth, these businesses take the liberty to redesign more of our online lives than any of us have asked for. As with Facebook, and to some extent now Amazon, there is no overarching pitch to its users beyond: Where else could you possibly go?

With impressive speed, companies founded to confront “intolerable” problems that it “must be possible to solve” have become intolerable in ways obvious to everyone but them. When Mark Zuckerberg was summoned in front of American and European lawmakers, the hardest questions to answer were some of the easiest to ask: Would Mr. Zuckerberg, whose company trades in such information, be comfortable sharing with the world the name of the hotel he stayed at last night, or the people he messaged with this week? (No, of course not.) How does Facebook make money? (An unilluminating “We run ads.”) Does Facebook have any competitors, really? (Sure, like ... email?)

There are companies that are mostly immune to the easy-question-hard-answer dynamic. Easy questions about Netflix, for one, tend to have easy answers: You pay; they stream. Most obvious questions about Apple can be answered by pointing out that it would like to sell you expensive items on a fairly regular basis. What these more straightforward companies have in common is that their founding questions doubled as consumer rallying cries — they asked, and continued to ask, about things that their customers need, or at least want, and tend to understand.

But for the rest of the tech giants, the easy questions have much harder answers. As these companies grew, they did more than just vanquish their competition. Their growth and free-service benevolence succeeded at making the very idea of competitors’ challenging their efforts — the industry’s traditional way to solve the problems they’ve created — seem unnecessary or even counterproductive. They’ve ducked the easy questions for so long that it’s reasonable to suspect that they doubt we will like the answers.

John Herrman is a technology reporter for The Times.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 12 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful? That’s an Easy One. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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