Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm.
The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.
The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are.
No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.
Texas Instruments' value is mostly in their integrated circuits IP (as well as manufacturing prowess, process knowledge, and a little bit of software). They're still solidly a "tech" company in my books.
For example, imagine a company with very little proprietary code because they focus entirely on renting out their CPU/GPU/disk capacity, for supercomputing, databases, render-farms, cloud backup, etc. I'd still call that a "tech company."
It's also not clear how this "intellectual property of the source code" angle would accommodate the network-effects or value of a subscriber-base... Well, I suppose you could argue that such an asset doesn't require high-tech means, it could all be snail-mail.
An X business is one that differentiates itself on factor X. If they use it in a truly innovative way (which changes — what was innovative in the 90s is commodity today) or develop new technologies in house than you’re a tech business.
Sure and some people take issue with aspects of how the world runs and want to discuss it.
> If you want to hold it against them then you are basically ranting...
Bold to state that making a critique of the status quo automatically amounts to "ranting".
> ...against all of capitalism rather than anything specific to "big tech".
It is not unreasonable to critique capitalism.
When you understand that, you know that is not how the world runs and is actually very specific to big tech as they pioneered this hyper specific shift. You do not have access to everyone's information who sees your billboard. You do however have access to exactly how many people in a certain area during a certain time with the income between 50-100k who are older men who enjoy football, has seen your digital ad. Hopefully that illustrates the difference well enough.
From 2018 to 2022, 95% of HN comments on the subject were against any form of Ads. Those who stood up for ads, were the absolute minority.
But then I guess you are right. Because those group of people are also the ones "ranting against all of capitalism".
The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices that are now cemented into the business model.
This is bad for society and it’s imperative on society to break up these entities and the power they wield as it’s incompatible with a democratic society.
And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?
People are using their own free will to use their products
Court order, legislation.
> And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?
Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, for starters.
By the way that’s not the definition of a monopoly.
> People are using their own free will to use their products
From an artificially constrained set of options. Anti competitive behavior has clear definable negative outcomes, you can feign confusion if you want but it’s not confusing.
Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens must be governed and restrained by democratic process in order for society to function.
That’s not what I meant. What would a break up for them look like? For instance AT&T was broken up into the baby bells.
> From an artificially constrained set of options
There is no other option for phones? Social media? Computers? Online commerce? And how is it “artificial”?
> Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens
So what is this “power”? How are they forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do?
The 'dirty' parts of tech: * media * social media * PII repackaging and unethical sourcing * targeted ads
Neutral or clean parts: * e-commerce * business automation * technical and educational information
Meta is an ad company and has a device business and happen to use social media to sell ads.
Amazon is rapidly shifting to be an ad company, who happens to use an e-commerce platform to place ads. They bought a healthcare company who collects massive amounts of PII and provide affiliate programs which funnel traffic into their ads and marketplace.
Apple, Microsoft and Google all have ad units that are major contributors to their overall profitability.
Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same.
So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about.