Global: Amnesty launches ‘Breaking up with Big Tech’ briefing

Amnesty International has launched a new briefing titled ‘Breaking up with Big Tech’ calling on governments to rein in the power of Big Tech companies in order to safeguard human rights.

The so-called big five tech companies – Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple – wield extraordinary influence over the infrastructure, services, and norms that shape our online lives. These companies dominate key sectors of the internet: from search engines and social media to app stores and cloud computing. Their largely unchecked power across various digital sectors poses serious risks to the right to privacy, the right to non-discrimination, freedom of opinion and access to information.

The briefing shows how these Big Tech companies have built their power, how they maintain it and how they are now moving to consolidate it further in emerging areas of artificial intelligence.

“Addressing this dominance is critical, not only as a matter of market fairness but as a pressing human rights issue. Breaking up these tech oligarchies will help create an online environment that is fair and just. Failure to address Big Tech dominance can have serious consequences offline, as our investigations into Facebook’s role in the Tigray war in Ethiopia and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar have shown.”

In many countries, these platforms have become so embedded in daily life that meaningful participation in society now depends on using their services. This gives them enormous power to influence public discourse and control information flows.

Documented cases of content removal, inconsistent moderation practices, and algorithmic biases highlight the dangers of allowing a few companies to dominate the digital public sphere.

Under international human rights law, states have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfil human rights including by regulating and using other measures to keep corporate power in check.

This is the first time Amnesty International has published a briefing of this nature to highlight how states should urgently address the uncontrolled power of these technology companies.

Amnesty International wrote to Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple on 12 August 2025 with a summary of the relevant findings contained in the briefing. Meta and Microsoft responded in writing and their responses are referenced in the briefing. Google, Amazon, and Apple had not responded by the time of publication.

Regulators and civil society groups across the world have made various efforts to try and address this issue. With the publication of this human rights-based approach to competition law and market power, Amnesty is lending its support to those efforts.

States and competition authorities should use competition laws as part of their human rights toolbox. States should investigate and sanction anti-competitive behaviours that harm human rights, prevent regulatory capture, and prevent harmful monopolies from forming.

The briefing recommends among other measures that states must:

• Investigate Big Tech for human rights harm linked to anti-competitive practices.

• Break up companies whose monopoly power is found to harm human rights.

• Investigate the emerging generative AI sector to establish human rights risks and impacts from anticompetitive practices.

• Block mergers and acquisitions that risk harming human rights

• Integrate human rights considerations into anti-competition investigations and decisions