Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft — better known as ‘Big
Tech’ — are today five of the six largest companies in the United States (US) and world by market
capitalisation.1 These firms have come under increasing scrutiny from antitrust authorities in the
European Union (EU), US and other jurisdictions due to the considerable market power that they
wield over their business ecosystems.
Antitrust investigations, however, have been hobbled by a lack of mandatory public disclosures
on Big Tech’s business activities from the annual public 10-K reports, which they file with the
US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the primary financial markets regulator. The public
is instead left to rely on whistle-blowers and litigation to piece together financial data on Big Tech’s
increasingly varied product offerings, and information on platform user operating metrics.
Public investors, regulators and competitors simply do not know how exactly Big Tech creates and
extracts value from the ecosystems that it has come to dominate. This constrains fair competition by
concealing profitable business opportunities from potential competitors; impedes antitrust activity by
limiting public scrutiny of possible abuses of market power; and prevents investors from allocating
capital efficiently, as companies’ true business prospects cannot properly be assessed.