Balanced Economy Project and 15 civil society organisations tell PM Andy Burnham: Unhook the UK economy from Big Tech's cables
Britain's economy has been quietly wired to serve a handful of dominant tech firms, and it's time to unplug it.
Today, a group of 16 civil society organisations in the UK have written to Andy Burnham MP on the day he is set to become Prime Minister, urging him to make breaking up concentrated Big Tech power a core tenet of his premiership.
The open letter, coordinated by the Balanced Economy Project and signed by organisations including ARTICLE 19, Global Action Plan, Future of Tech Institute (FOTI), Good Law Project, Global Justice Now, Open Rights Group and the People vs Big Tech, argues that the UK has quietly become dependent on a handful of dominant Big Tech platforms. The structural market power of these platforms to shape our economy, and the lives of people in our communities is the root cause of many of the problems the UK currently faces.
The letter sends a clear message to Burnham as he charts a new course for the United Kingdom. In order to bring about the scale of change needed to come good on his promise of “good growth in every postcode”, Burnham must tackle the structural power of Big Tech. We share Burnham’s ambition. But that growth cannot take root while a handful of Big Tech monopolies sit astride the digital economy, extracting value from British communities, returning it to shareholders overseas, and passing the environmental costs on to the rest of us. You cannot build good growth in every postcode on top of an economic model designed to concentrate wealth in a handful of boardrooms. Something has to give, and it shouldn't be the public interest. The letters serves as a call to stop letting a handful of monopolies dictate the terms on which technology serves this country. "Our call to you is not for an anti-tech response, but an anti-monopoly one," the letter states.
We call on the Prime Minister to:
Use the powers already on the books. Stop letting monopolies write the rules: The Competition and Markets Authority's own cloud market investigation found that Microsoft and Amazon Web Services together control more than three quarters of the UK market. The CMA found the harm. It has still failed to act on it. We're calling for a new government steer that finally gives the CMA the independence to use the powers Parliament already gave it.
End Britain's dependence on tech giants and their infrastructure; make data centres answer to climate limits, not shareholder demands: Critical infrastructure, including the systems running the NHS and defence, is increasingly hard-wired to serve foreign-owned firms operating far outside meaningful UK democratic control. We're calling for the government's own Chronic Risk Analysis, which reportedly names Big Tech dominance a "chronic risk" to the country, to be published in full rather than kept from public view. And we're calling for new data centres to run on genuinely additional renewable power, not gas generators bolted on to meet demand, and to stop out-competing housing and other priority sectors for scarce water and grid capacity.
Put the state's own purchasing power to work with smart public procurement, starting now: Government has one of the most direct levers over Big Tech dependency sitting unused: what it chooses to buy. Reports that a Burnham government might move Palantir out of the NHS are a start. We're calling for that to happen immediately, by ending the NHS Federated Data Platform contract with Palantir, and for UK and open alternatives to be built into public contracts as standard from here on, not left to chance.
The full text of the letter, and the complete list of signatories, is available here.