Big Tech has shifted from a focus on genuine innovation to a model of value extraction, where massive fines for manipulative and monopolistic practices are now treated as a routine cost of doing business, says Paul Armstrong
Amazon’s $2.5bn fine for dark patterns and Google’s courtroom escape from monopoly charges reveal how much the industry has changed. The companies that once embodied innovation now look more like repeat offenders paying their way out of scrutiny. The public face of Big Tech is no longer the engineer in a hoodie solving global problems but the corporate lawyer negotiating settlements and dodging regulation. Where once there was inevitability about their progress, there is now a steady drip of payouts, loopholes and evasions that make even the most hardened capitalist ask whether this really counts as leadership.
A rap sheet as long as the innovation pipeline
The Amazon penalty handed down by the US Federal Trade Commission is the largest consumer protection settlement in American history. Regulators accused Amazon of using deceptive design to trap users into Prime subscriptions and make cancellation intentionally difficult. The payout is a warning shot at manipulative “dark patterns” baked into digital platforms: tricks that prize short-term revenue over long-term trust.
Amazon is not alone. Meta agreed to pay $725m to resolve litigation over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where personal data from tens of millions of users was harvested without consent. Apple recently settled for $490m in a shareholder lawsuit that alleged Tim Cook misled investors about slowing iPhone sales in China. Google has been a repeat headline. In December 2023, it paid $700m to settle an antitrust case over its Play Store, agreeing to changes in how developers can distribute apps and charge users. TikTok has also paid more than $92m to settle privacy claims in the United States, including allegations that it collected and shared personal data without proper consent. The European Union has been equally aggressive. In 2023, Meta was fined €1.2bn for illegal data transfers, the largest GDPR penalty to date. Google faced a €4.3bn fine from the European Commission for anticompetitive Android bundling practices.
The rap sheet is long, international and expensive. Fines and settlements are no longer reputational shocks. They have become recurring line items on balance sheets.
From invention to extraction
The bigger question is why these companies, once synonymous with invention, are so reliant on practices that look manipulative, monopolistic, and borderline evil by default. When did the brightest minds of Silicon Valley decide the best use of talent was to design cancellation hurdles or bury competitors through bundling over outthinking them? Innovation used to mean new products and services that dazzled or improved life. Increasingly, it looks like big tech is out of ideas and has no alternatives but to skirt antitrust law or push customers into paying for things they did not intend to buy.
Decline isn’t often well understood when looked at in isolation so let’s go back. Innovation has historically thrived when companies reinvested profits, governments funded research and accountability kept markets honest. The so-called golden age of capitalism between the 1940s and 1970s was defined by high corporate taxation, unionised workforces and vast public spending on infrastructure and science. The result was real breakthroughs: semiconductors, satellites, vaccines, consumer electronics (think Xerox, Bell Labs). Companies operated with long time horizons and delivered progress that reshaped daily life. Contrast that with today’s emphasis on stock buybacks, monopolistic lock-in, and dark patterns. Incentives have shifted from creating value to extracting it.
An industry that once promised transformation now seems trapped in a cycle of putting its finger on the scales, paying off regulators, settling lawsuits and explaining itself in courtrooms rather than winning in markets. Creativity has given way to compliance management. Integrity has been replaced by incremental rule-bending. For those building businesses without trillion-dollar cushions, the lesson is sobering: if the best in the world cannot win without resorting to questionable tactics, what hope is left for everyone else?
Build out bad from the bottom
The temptation is to read the pattern as encouragement: push as far as you can until caught, then treat the fine as the cost of doing business. Dangerous for firms without the scale to absorb billion-dollar hits; a £10m fine can destroy a mid-cap company in a way it barely dents a global platform. What looks like strategy for a tech giant is often suicide for everyone else. The top needs less incentives that encourage accepting bad choices, and more repercussions when they are chosen. Several acts on both sides of the Atlantic are proposing prison sentences for CEO’s like the ‘Corporate Executive Accountability Act’ which may explain the CEO’s bunker spending sprees that are happening.
The better response is to treat trust as infrastructure, not ornament. Customers are increasingly aware of dark patterns and manipulative design. Regulators are becoming more coordinated, especially across the US and EU. Investors are more cautious about governance risk. Companies that lean on cheap tricks may see short-term uplift but will find their brand eroded, their compliance costs spiralling, and their resilience compromised.
Leadership teams should embed cultural guardrails, not just legal ones. Decisions should be measured against long-term trust, not just quarterly revenue. Employees should be encouraged to ask not only “can we” but “should we.” Procurement and partnership strategies should reflect the same discipline: doing business with firms that treat fines as routine sends a message to staff and customers about what standards truly matter. Every business has a choice to go with AWS, Google or elsewhere. Vote with your wallets, it’s the only thing that has truly changed minds and behaviours of businesses fast.
Periods of economic uncertainty make morality harder to defend. Yet morality is precisely what can differentiate. When customers and employees are exhausted by manipulative design, lobbying, and clever legal defenses, the company that offers clarity, fairness and respect will stand out. Trust costs more to build than to lose, but in markets defined by volatility, it is the only durable advantage.
Big Tech’s legal escapades are not simply about lawbreaking, they are symptoms of a system that rewards extraction over invention. The lesson for the rest of us is not to copy them, whether you can afford to or not. The companies that thrive in the next decade will be those that refuse to accept fines as an acceptable strategy, don’t work with those that do, and instead compete with ingenuity, transparency and resilience.