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........

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