This statement is an oxymoron.
"Tech giants" hobble the open principles of the internet by their own existence, persistence and, by-definition, over-bearing influence.
Any entity genuinely concerned with preserving open principles would seek to limit its growth far-prior to where Google is now, and eliminate the pervasiveness of its influence, favouring and encouraging the results of diverse decentralisation over narrow centralisation.
Google and Facebook are the antithesis of everything the concept of an open internet stands for.
If anything Apple has does more harm than anyone to the Web by pushing the idea of native apps for everything served from a closed proprietary App Store that you can’t even side load around.
You can index and organize the content of an intranet of every large organization.
Good luck. The magic of the internet is that everything is public and interlinked.
Usually within a company the incentives are such that information is more tightly controlled. A software engineer doesn't see purchase orders and an HR specialist doesn't see software assignments. Usually a directory is more useful than a search within a company. Obviously there are exceptions.
A real hero knows when to resist the fear and borrow the power from the giants.
Just because it's what's "always" happened before, doesn't mean we can't do better.
This being the case is the very driving force of any innovation.
Your statement seems like defeatism wrapped in a pretty bow of faux-insight.
A tendency toward giants is also not necessarily a sustainable state of affairs.
Once technology becomes sufficiently advanced and pervasive, the window of time available for a giant to gestate, before the next giant-level disruption, inevitably shrinks to the point the system reaches an equilibrium of innovational equanimity and balance.
This is ordinary and expected, and parallels can be seen anywhere in nature.
The - relatively-brief - "time of giants" of human progress may soon be coming to a close.
I don't think we need a real hero here, we need end-user solidarity perhaps in the form of public policy and market regulation. Humans would have more freedom on the internet if corporate giants didn't.
Fixed it for you.
EDIT: typo
This. This right here.
It seems lately that Google has just become Yet Another Large Software Firm, with everything that that implies.
Most of my searches result in a wall of sales or product pages. Hardly 'open' when they turned it into glorified yellow pages
These companies -- all of them -- are fucking with each other. None of us matter in the end. It's all about which company can screw the other out of engagement and eyeballs.
Meanwhile Firefox, the open web, open source, right to repair, and digital ownership all wither away.
Well that is kind of how media companies compete against each other, but the key question is: is it beneficial or harmful to the public?
You could argue that Apple is acquiring users who they then lock in, sell to advertisers and developers (for a 30% cut on the App store) and monetize with service subscriptions, but you can also argue that half of Apple's profit is still from hardware sales, that apps and services are a big reason for buying that hardware, so Apple is still beholden to its hardware customers to some extent.
And Google has https://wellbeing.google as well as associated features in Android, and Apple has also implemented "screen time" tracking and limits.
Facebook scored the mortal wound on the web — they reinvented a bigger, badder AOL closed garden.