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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ The Broken Bargain of Big Tech (2026-05-03) :: View in Browser
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What’s On My Mind: The Broken Bargain of Big Tech
This week, something that’s been burrowed into my mind ever since I heard it.
A couple of weeks ago, SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin said this on LinkedIn:
“For 20 years, I was a staunch proponent of “white hat” only. Now? Now that Google and the rest of Big Tech have proven themselves to be far, far more evil than any black hat SEO ever was? I say: screw ‘em. As long as it doesn’t hurt you/your business, you have no responsibility to be ethical toward giant corporations that would never return the favor.”
This has stuck with me for days now, turning it over in my head. He’s not wrong. From ingesting massive amounts of data without consent or compensation to willfully causing mental health harm to declaring that it’s too inconvenient to stop human trafficking, Rand’s point is reinforced by the piles and piles of lawsuits surrounding Big Tech that they’ve lost.
Disclaimer and Warning: To be clear, since there’s room for misinterpretation here, neither Rand nor I advocate doing anything illegal or harmful to your business. Do not break laws.
Part 1: The Broken Bargain
Let’s talk about the bargain that big tech companies, particularly social media and search companies, had with us, the marketers and the people. The bargain for the longest time was, “you give us your data and we’ll send you traffic, or customers”, or something along those lines. There was give and take. We gave our data, they gave us business. In the early days of the web, we would allow companies like Google to index our content in exchange for referrals. Over time, in the last 25 years, that bargain has gotten steadily worse.
Part of it is because of completely irresponsible use of their technology on the part of big tech companies. Companies like Meta, for example, allowed their system to be abused by election interference teams in 2016, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They ended up using that as an excuse to continue turning the screws on all of us over the years.
Anyone who has ever maintained a social media account for a business has been in the situation where you had reach and interactions with your audience at first, for free, and then over time it got harder and harder to reach that audience without paying until even today. Not only can you not reach your audience without paying, even when you do pay, you don’t necessarily reach your audience.
Google used to be just a collection of 10 blue links; back in the golden era of search, you could reliably count on Google to deliver you substantial amounts of business, in exchange for your data. Google has steadily taken over more and more of the real estate in search results, and now pretty much everything in a Google search result is intermediated in some way, from the one box to widgets to summaries and web guide and now AI overviews and AI mode.
Rand Fishkin at SparkToro, formerly at Moz, showed over time that Google has sent less and less traffic, fewer and fewer clicks, every single year. With things like AI overviews, that gets even worse; Search Engine Land reports that 2/3 of clicks never generate traffic now. The bargain has been rotting away for some time.
It isn’t just search, it’s also social media. Look at a system like Twitter, or their company formerly known as Twitter, I suppose. This was a company that for 15 years was the open standard of data sharing.
People could use its network graph to identify who was influential. It was one of the reasons why Twitter was so valuable and why so many influencer marketing systems were benchmarked against it, because you could browse the data without having to pay for it. And this didn’t stop people from advertising on the system, quite the opposite. People advertised there, even though it did not have the reach or draw of Meta and its properties.
When Elon Musk bought the company in 2022 and locked down the system in 2023, that came to a stop, and only the wealthiest, largest partner companies could access the data. That has been the case across all major networks now. Only the biggest, most well-heeled partner companies can access data. This puts smaller businesses at a complete disadvantage. They can no longer access any of their own data, and they are reliant on bigger tech partners - for considerable sums of money - to access data that used to be readily available.
As quickly as they could, the big tech companies tilted the tables in their favor - more for them, less for everyone else.
This is the part that pisses me off. The fortunes they have built and the money and power they have accumulated came from us, from our data. At the end of the day they built their empires on our data. Without us, they would literally have no product.
One of the definitions of social networks relies on the network effect, first described by Bob Metcalfe during the founding of Ethernet. A network effect is any effect where adding nodes to the network builds the network’s overall value. A network of fax machines has value, and every new fax machine sold increases the value of existing ones.
Social networks without users have no value. There’s no intrinsic value to them. If you were to put up a video site and put up a bunch of videos on it, it would have value to users without them contributing. That’s essentially what our blogs are or were, our newsletters, things like that.
We put up the content, and you don’t need to be an active participant to get value from it. A social network does not have value until users put content in it. So the social network relies on user contributions. Our data is what makes it valuable. Search engines also would not have any value if we were not actively contributing content to them through the publishing of it on the internet.
We have lost sight, as consumers, of who has the actual power, in the sense that if we stop publishing, if we stop contributing, the value of the network declines (or is taken over by marketing slop, which is effectively the same thing). This also means that when we’re using these tools, we have a right to our data. Everything that we do, everything we click on, everything we scroll by or swipe by, that is our data. We are contributing it to these companies, and they are giving us nothing in return. There is no value exchange.
It’s gotten so bad that in certain parts of the world, like Europe, regulations like GDPR had to force companies to allow us to download some of our own data, and even then, not all of it. If you’ve used tools like the data privacy and data download tools in any social network, you get a subset of your data, you do not get all your data.
They may say, “Oh, well, we keep you connected to your friends.” Yeah, I can email them. I don’t need your stupid social network to do that. I can use this old-fashioned thing called a telephone if I really want to talk to them. But we have been conditioned - duped - into believing that we need these systems, and that we should be grateful for whatever crumbs of data they’re willing to let us have.