Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, and the author of We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age, which won the 2024 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Her next book, Mirrored States, will be published in 2027.

In the digital realm, small mistakes can result in big consequences.

On July 19, 2024, a faulty software update from a company most people had never heard of grounded global air travel from Hong Kong to Hamburg. Hospitals couldn’t access medical records or schedule appointments. Banks froze payments. Millions of people suddenly found themselves cut off from everyday services they assumed were reliable, all because of one cybersecurity company: CrowdStrike.

What was a planned routine update from CrowdStrike triggered the largest global IT incident on record, crippling more than 8.5 million Windows machines. They fixed the bug the same day, but the fallout lingered.

Images of stranded travellers and closed retail terminals peppered the news. Delta Airlines cancelled 7,000 flights and has since been cleared to sue CrowdStrike for the losses.

What the CrowdStrike fiasco revealed is that we’re governed continuously, and unavoidably, by a complicated, interconnected and deeply enmeshed system of data-intensive platforms. That is, technologies (often working seamlessly in the background) structure how we live. When they fail, we feel the lack of order – the lack of governance – immediately.

Technologies govern. Governance means setting the conditions under which people live, play and work – establishing rules, shaping expectations and allocating resources. When we say “Big Tech,” we mean the many companies that govern our lives, through their platforms that traffic in data.

It’s time we acknowledge that governance explicitly. As governors, Big Tech companies should take accountability for the outsized role they play in our lives.

We often talk about Big Tech as if it were just Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft – the Big Five. Add Tesla and Nvidia if you like – the Magnificent Seven, instead. What unifies them is economic: market capitalization, stock valuations or shares across markets.

What if we thought about “bigness” as their embeddedness and indispensability in our lives? Not just user base, but the depth of our collective and individual entanglement with the platforms they run. These companies create platforms for users to access online resources. Through these platforms, they collect, store and analyze the behavioural data about and made by humans.

I recently chatted with a friend about libraries over dinner as we shared photos on our phones – and libraries popped up in her socials and online ads the next day. When my sister was house hunting, she and I were texting about a Midwestern city I was speaking in; the next day, her suggested houses included properties in that city, thousands of kilometres away from her targeted search. Big Tech companies mediate communication, commerce, transportation, entertainment, education, health care, and social services – and, now, they’re our portals to AI.

Big Tech companies, it can be said, not only control the means of connection through platforms, but also the means to computation as organizations and individuals rely increasingly on AI, which in turn depends on cloud computing. Platforms pull us in and data encourage us to stay. Your connectivity gives you access to a share of computation that is not otherwise possible.

Governing is about creating a shared order with enforceable expectations. Since the Second World War, we’ve lived in a world where governance is presumed to be, and set up as, the domain of states, or governments. Today, we live in a world of multiple governors: states, yes, but also Big Tech governance.

Big Tech governs through:

• Data: More data means better platforms; better platforms attract more users; more users produce more data. These self-reinforcing........

© The Globe and Mail