When the global financial crisis slowly subsided in the spring of 2010, tech giants Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (GAFA) were collectively valued at just under 450 billion euros by market cap. These companies were drivers of innovation that pointed the way forward, enterprises at the center of a flourishing technological ecosystem with a creative and technology-driven vision.

Over the past decade, the transformation of society's relationship to these companies is unprecedented. We use the products of the GAFA companies to manage almost our entire professional and private lives. And during the coronavirus crisis, the value of the tech giants have increased even more. The GAFA companies, taken together, currently have a market capitalization of 6 trillion euros, which is about five times as much as the entire German DAX index.

The dominance of the GAFA companies has become so great that individual governments have no choice but to submit themselves to them.

Google and Apple dictated the interface for the Corona app, not the other way around. When Australia wanted to introduce a new law on fair remuneration for its publishing houses, Google unashamedly threatened to switch off its search engine in the country.

It seems that many German and European politicians have given in to the superior power of the GAFA companies. Complicated regulatory issues are not very attractive election campaign topics, after all. This powerlessness is also reflected in the practically nonexistent media debate.

It is my steadfast conviction that how we handle the US tech monopolies will dictate Europe's future. Never before in the history of our continent have so few companies possessed so much power never before were they able to exert such a profound influence on our lives.

And even if it seems almost unimaginable the technological revolution is not yet over. Quite the opposite is true. We are still in the early phases. If we want, we can still make the rules that will shape our future. But the room for the maneuvering needed to do this is shrinking, and time is running out. If we want to know what to do next, then it is vital that we gain an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms by which the tech monopolies operate.

In the 20th century, a company's wealth came from its factories, machines, and its qualified employees. In Germany and the EU, our entire education and economic systems are designed based on this formula. The problem is that the digital world functions completely differently.

In the digital world customer behavior is evaluated in real time. This allows digital services to be continuously improved and aligned precisely to customer needs and desires. The more data is collected, the better the algorithms work and the more relevant the offers presented to customers become.

Over the past decade, the GAFA companies have built a huge competitive advantage because they control the operating systems, the search engines, the browsers, and the cloud infrastructure. They also own the shopping marketplaces, the communication platforms, the networked household appliances, and the app stores.

To return to our picture of the 20th century, the tech monopolies not only have factories and machines, they also increasingly own the entire infrastructure of the value-creation chain, including all the businesses and all of the communication channels to the customer. With every new customer, this value-creation chain becomes more efficient and more profitable. Competition in the GAFA infrastructure is only allowed for as long as the competitor compensates the monopolist or helps the monopolist towards even more expansive growth.

The capital that the GAFA companies suck out of the system using this mechanism is fed straight back into undermining the competition or accessing new areas of business. The vendors on Amazon's marketplace are just as dependent on the goodwill of the platform as media companies are on Google or Facebook. This goodwill can only be acquired by consistently providing access to all content and data, thus continuing to feed the monopoly and making it more efficient.

The enormous profitability of these infrastructure services allows the GAFA companies to invest in new fields of business on a very long-term basis. To do this, the monopolists are willing to accept high losses for many years in order to weaken the competition and build up market shares. Due to the enormous market capitalization of the GAFA companies, it is necessary for them to continue to occupy large and lucrative markets to keep the expansive system going and to increase their stock market price.

The favorite argument put forward by the GAFA companies to divert attention away from their position of power is that the products are free for the consumers and that they greatly improve the lives of all of us.

That is a sneaky argument that might seem plausible at first glance. However, it is a deliberate trick. The products sold via the platforms must finance the high profits of the GAFA companies which means that the users are paying indirectly.

What is even worse: they are forced to hand over their personal data. The tech giants have no reservations whatsoever when it comes to analyzing their customers down to the smallest detail. They know that we can no longer live without their products, and that is why antitrust fines or occasional political objections are a small price for them to pay on the way to increasing their market dominance.

Our dependency on the GAFA companies' infrastructure makes things extremely difficult for our government authorities because they want to help the citizens, not cause them problems.

A life without iPhones, Google Maps, WhatsApp, or Amazon is hard to imagine and not exactly something we are striving for. The bundling together of the different services such as the integration of maps into Google's search engine, or the linkup between the app stores and the smartphone operating systems makes it even more difficult to break up the monopolies.

Not that GAFA doesn't deserve our respect for having understood this connection years ago and for placing it at the heart of their strategy to defend what they do and exculpate them from any wrongdoing. None of us can imagine a world without their dominance anymore. And therein lies the problem, as well as the political and regulatory challenge.

The large tech corporations spend billions on image campaigns and employ an army of lobbyists in Berlin, Brussels and Washington, DC. There is hardly a single association, NGO, or start-up hub in the political sphere that they do not support in some way or other. Politicians and entrepreneurs who point out alternatives are with only few exceptions reeled in again by the lobbyists and opinion-makers, attacked in the media or have their businesses damaged.

There are two possible exit scenarios for the end of the tech monopolies. If we continue without strict regulation of GAFA, the polarization within society will grow. The economic opportunities of smaller businesses will shrink more and more because of the growing profits of the monopolies, and the GAFA companies will be able to take over whole new fields of business.

An ever-growing concentration of economic power will lead in the medium term to an erosion of the market economy. This will soon cause social unrest, distribution struggles, and an increasing destabilization of our liberal democracy, which will be unable to gain control of the economic inequality.

There have been clear signs of this development for many years, but our debate so far remains focused on the symptoms instead of asking about the causes. This is regrettable, because the facts are there for anyone to see. You only have to look at where record turnovers are being made in the midst of a great European recession, where profits are increasing permanently, and market shares are being gained.

And in my opinion, this dark scenario can only end in a state run by autocratic populists. We only have to look at protectionist China to see where this might lead. The GAFA companies have nothing to say there anymore, and the Chinese have constructed their own tech ecosystem. The Chinese population pays a very high price for this in the form of an illiberal dictatorship in which politicians decide who is allowed to have economic success.

The second, optimistic exit scenario is a return to European sovereignty and our social market economy. Ludwig Erhard, who as Minister of Economic Affairs led Germany's remarkable post-war economic recovery (the Wirtschaftswunder, or 'economic miracle'), and later became Chancellor, already postulated that a market economy can only work if it works for everyone. What Erhard was referring to here was protection against interference in the state, but also protection against monopolists and cartels.

Ludwig's legacy is being kept alive today by the likes of EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who campaigns like almost no other politician in Europe for regulation of the GAFA companies. However, in contrast to the eagerness for reform in the early years of the Federal Republic, the EU is slower as well as unclear in its vision and in its willingness to shape the future. And that is precisely the weakness that the US corporations have been exploiting for many years.

In my mind, there can be no doubt that splitting up the GAFA companies is unavoidable in the long term if we want the liberal democracies of the Western world to survive. This is not only in the hands of the EU, but is ultimately a decision of the US government. Which is why this topic must be given utmost priority in German and European foreign policy.

The US is rightly demanding that we take our security interests increasingly into our own hands. But the ability to act in a self-determined manner also requires a functioning market economy, which is why we must immediately prompt the US to modernize its antitrust legislation and, after sharp debate in the Senate, to also become active in the campaign to split up the GAFA companies.

In the meantime, Vestager and the EU recently embarked on the pragmatic path towards intelligent regulations by announcing the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA defines what gatekeeper platforms are and submits them to much stricter competitive restraints. For example, giving their own products preferential treatment in the marketplaces, as currently practiced by Amazon and Google, is to be prohibited and carries a heavy fine.

In my eyes, this is still not enough to cope with the problem of GAFA market power. We must define, isolate, and regulate the critical infrastructure of the GAFA companies. This applies, in particular, to the evaluation of personal data, and to the allocation of their enormous profits. Whether Google's search engine, Facebook's WhatsApp, or the Amazon Cloud: data and profits from this critical infrastructure must not be used to expand into other markets.

Just as we would not allow an electricity generation company to make unlimited profits to enter into direct competition with Miele, Siemens, and Bosch, we must subject our digital infrastructure to the same regulatory checks and controls. The data and the algorithms of the monopolists must be available to all of us so that those participating in the market can engage in fair competition on the platforms to the benefit of the customers.

For a long time, I was skeptical about whether Europe can succeed in managing this enormous task. But, in the meantime, I see reason for optimism. When Facebook recently wanted to force WhatsApp users to share all their data so that their advertising could more easily reach users via Facebook and Instagram, the update resulted in a huge surge towards alternative messaging services like Signal and Telegram.

Both of these have been at the top of the app stores for weeks now and differ from WhatsApp in that they request much less data. A turning point has been heralded in, and people are ready for a future that is different from the one imagined by the GAFA companies. The political decision-makers in Brussels and Berlin should follow this lead. The social market economy is one of our greatest achievements and is the foundation of our democracy.

And we should fight for it, especially in the digital age, undaunted by the size and power of its opponents.

This article originally appeared in WELT.

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The regulation of tech monopolies will decide the fate of Western democracies - Business Insider - Business Insider

Open up any social media app on your phone and you'll see it: links to COVID-19 information from trustworthy sources. Here, a Twitter screen reads, "No, 5G isn't causing coronavirus." Michele Abercrombie/NPR hide caption

Open up any social media app on your phone and you'll see it: links to COVID-19 information from trustworthy sources. Here, a Twitter screen reads, "No, 5G isn't causing coronavirus."

Open up any social media app on your phone and you'll likely see links to COVID-19 information from trustworthy sources.

Pinned to the top of Instagram's search function, the handles of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization are prominently featured. Click and you'll find posts and stories how to keep safe during the pandemic.

In the home section of the YouTube app, there's a playlist of videos that promote vaccination and counteract vaccination misinformation from WHO, the Journal of the American Medical Association and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.

And on the Twitter app, you might spot a warning under posts with fake or misleading COVID-19 information. A tweet from a user falsely proclaiming that 5G causes coronavirus, for example, has a big blue exclamation mark with a message from Twitter: "Get the facts about COVID-19." It links to a story debunking the claim from a U.K. media outlet called iNews.

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In the noisy news landscape, these are just some of the features launched by the tech industry to bring down COVID-19 misinformation and deliver facts to the public.

This effort didn't happen spontaneously. The World Health Organization sparked the efforts in Feb. 2020 in the early days of the coronavirus crisis. The U.N. agency teamed up with over 40 tech companies to help disseminate facts, minimize the spread of false information and remove misleading posts.

But there's one big question that's tough to answer: Is it working?

Have any of these efforts actually changed people's behavior in the pandemic or encouraged them to turn to more credible sources?

Health messaging experts and misinformation specialists interviewed for this story praise WHO's efforts to reach billions of people through these tech industry partnerships. But they say the actions taken by the companies have not been enough and may even be problematic.

Vish Viswanath, a professor of health communication in the department of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been closely monitoring the global health content spread by the tech industry since the pandemic started.

"The WHO deserves credit for recognizing that the sheer flood of misinformation the infodemic is a problem and for trying to do something about it," he says. "But the tech sector has not been particularly helpful in stemming the tide of misinformation."

Researchers say there are limits to some of the anti-misinformation tactics used by social media companies.

Flagging or pulling down a problematic social media post often comes too late to undo the harm, says Nasir Memon, professor of computer science and engineering at New York University. His research includes cybersecurity and human behavior.

"It only comes after the post has gone viral. A company might do a fact check and put a warning label," he says. "But by then the ones who consumed that information already have been influenced in some way."

For example, in October, President Donald Trump claimed in a Twitter post that he had COVID-19 immunity after he was sick. According to the CDC: "There is no firm evidence that the antibodies that develop in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection are protective." The post was taken off Twitter after being flagged by fact-checkers but not before it had been shared with millions of his followers.

And there are no guarantees that people are going to take the time to click on a link to credible sources to "learn more," as the labels suggest, says Viswanath.

These "learn more" and "for more information" COVID-19 labels can be found on almost every tech platform yes, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but also Tinder, the dating app (every few swipes there are reminders to wash hands and observe physical distancing, with links to WHO messages) and Uber, the ridesharing app (a section on its website with rider safety information directs people to WHO for pandemic guidance).

"If I'm sitting in some community somewhere, busy with my life, worried about my job, worried about whether the kids are going to school or not, the last thing I want to do is go to a World Health Organization or CDC website," Viswanath adds.

WHO is aware these measures aren't perfect. Melinda Frost, with WHO's risk communication team, concedes that simply removing posts can create new problems. She shares a December study from the disinformation analytics company Graphika. It found that the crackdown on anti-vaccine videos on YouTube has led their proponents to repost the videos on other video-hosting sites like BitChute, favored by the far-right.

YouTube removes videos if they violate its COVID-19 policy. Videos that claim the COVID-19 vaccine kills people or will be used as a means of population reduction, for example, are not allowed. But other platforms may have less stringent policies.

"We may expect a proliferation of alternative platforms as fact checking and content removal measures are strengthened on social media," Frost says.

Researchers say it's hard to know whether any of these efforts have actually changed people's behavior in the pandemic or encouraged them to turn to more credible sources.

Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, a nonprofit organization that researches misinformation, says "we have almost no empirical evidence about the impact of these interventions on the platforms. We can't just assume that things that seem to make sense [such as taking a post down or directing people to a trustworthy source] would actually have the consequences we would expect."

Andy Pattison, who leads WHO's digital partnerships in Geneva, says the organization is now trying to assess impact.

WHO is working with Google, for example, on a questionnaire for users to see whether the company's efforts have resulted in behavior change and/or increased knowledge regarding COVID-19. Since the early days of the crisis, Google has ensured that users searching for "COVID" or related terms on its search engine see official news outlets and local health agencies in its top results, says Pattison.

In the absence of current data, past research can shed some light on social media misinformation.

For example, an April 2020 study from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering found that warning labels messages such as "multiple fact-checking journalists dispute the credibility of this news" can reduce people's intention to share false information. The likelihood, however, varied depending on the participant's political orientation and gender.

Memon, the lead author of the report, says the findings are relevant to social media policing in the pandemic. "Fact checking [on social media platforms] is going to become an important aspect of what we do as a society to help counter the spread of misinformation," he says.

Both Memon and Viswanath say with tens of millions of posts being shared on social media a day, companies need to scale up efforts to take down false information.

"They have the power. They have the reach. They should be more aggressive and active than they have been," says Viswanath.

Memon suggests that companies could deploy stronger mechanisms to verify users' identities. That could help prevent people from creating troll accounts to anonymously spread falsehoods and rumors, he says. And Viswanath suggests that tech companies hire teams of experts ethicists, researchers, scientists, doctors for advice on how to handle false information.

As for WHO, it's learned a key lesson during the pandemic. "Information alone is not going to shift behavior," says Frost, who has been working on WHO campaigns to debunk unjustified medical claims on social media.

So over the past few months, the organization has been gathering a group of sociologists, behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists to study how information circulates, how it can be managed and how it can change people's minds.

"A lot of what we know about behavior change really requires something closer to the individual making sure the information we have is relevant to individuals and makes sense in their lives," she says.

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To Fight COVID-19 Misinformation, WHO Is Partnering With Big Tech : Goats and Soda - NPR

In an ironic turn of events, social media companies had to shut the account of Donald Trump an authoritarian president whose rise to power and grotesque attacks on democracythey had themselves enabled. Indeed, despite the lauded actions of social media companies that have blocked Trump after the capital riot, social media has been one of the main motors of the damaging effects of fake news and increased division worldwide. Here is why we should refuse this fatalistic view and break the power of big tech.

In the confusion of early 2021, at a time when the world was still gripped by the worst pandemic in a century and the US Capitol was under the assault of a pro-Trump mob set on overturning the results of the election, big tech corporations made an unprecedented move. Social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter suspended the social media accounts of a sitting US president.

The existential threat that the Capital riot and its fraudulent accusations of a stolen election presented to the democratic process required exceptional measures. Trumps authoritarian impulses should have been suppressed even long before. We do not dispute that. The question however is whether the power to decide on and execute these exceptional measures lies solely in the hands of the CEOs of several private companies.

The sovereign to borrow the expression coined last century by political scientist Carl Schmitt is the one who decides on the state of exception. Given that the exceptional decision to suspend Trumps Twitter and Facebook account was not taken by the judiciary or legislative power, but by private companies, does that make them de facto sovereign entities?

In another remarkable though less commented decision, only a few days apart from the Capitol assault, Twitter refused to automatically transfer Trumps followers to Biden, as they did four years before when Trump took over Obamas account. Biden was forced to start anew with zero followers, with no explanation from Twitter.

Was this a display of sovereign power? If big tech wields this kind of leverage over both an outgoing and an incoming US president, one can only imagine what they are capable of doing when dealing with less powerful sovereign states around the world. Or with defenseless citizens. For one thing, the events of early 2021 have laid bare these huge power differentials.

Unraveling the unity of sovereign power achieved by modern nation states is sending us back to a modern form of technological feudalism. While all eyes are on the US elections, democracy around the world is under threat because of the exploitative, recklessly profit-driven, and non-transparent functioning of big tech companies.

Over a decade of mass social media usage, powered by algorithms that are exclusively aimed at maximising sales, even if that means manipulating our fears and reinforcing our pre-existing biases, has also incredibly polarised public debate and created fertile ground for the spread of unverified claims and ludicrous conspiracy theories.

Big tech companies have made themselves indispensable in many aspects of life. In many countries, Facebook is equivalent to the internet, as Facebook Zero allows access to Facebook without mobile charges.

It would be unimaginable to run a political campaign, let alone public office, without massive social media use. They are now making themselves equally indispensable in the control of the abuses that derive from it, wielding an unprecedented power of censorship.

There is some irony in big tech having to shut down an authoritarian president whose rise to power and attacks on democracy they had themselves enabled. Socialmedia platforms are trying to portray themselves as the cure for the illness of modern democracy they are largely responsible for, but we should absolutely refuse a narrative that sees the quasi-sovereign power of big tech as unavoidable.

While their actions do make them de facto sovereign entities, it is not the content, but the size of the companies, that is the main problem.

In the end, we the Technological Sovereignty DSC do not believe that a legal solution (either through an intra- or supra-national approaches) is feasible, as a whole new court system would need to be established for the flood of cases, whenever a post is taken down.

A viable alternative thus has to be decentralisation of power, no monopolies or oligopolies of a few very powerful companies, so information and its flow is not controlled by the few.

Various platforms already exist, and are run and used by digital sovereignty conscious people (and not driven by shareholder profits), but the majority of people have yet to question the monopolies of big tech.

DiEM25 made Technological Sovereignty one of its pillars and you can read all about it here.

Additionally, start using alternatives to the options of big tech, some existing alternatives are:

Peertube as an alternative to Youtube

Mastodon as an alternative to Facebook

Matrix as an alternative to WhatsApp

Mattermost as an alternative to Slack

Photo byTracy Le BlancfromPexels.

Do you want to be informed of DiEM25's actions? Sign up here

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Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (3), Getty Images

Censorship online by Big Tech is a bad idea, in large part because its a distraction from the problem of how social media companies promote, spread and amplify harmful information, according to author Peter Pomerantsev.

Its ridiculous to think that you can regulate the billions of things people say every day, or that we should, or that its even feasible. So I dont think thats the way forward, Pomerantsev said in an interview on The Long Game, a Yahoo News podcast. Therell be a way to get out of the whole tricky thing of taking one comment down or leaving it up.

The way out, he said, is through forcing the tech companies to be transparent about how they are manipulating the spread of information, and holding them accountable to prevent public harms.

Pomerantsev is a Russian-born journalist now based in London whose parents were hounded by the KGB secret police in Soviet Russia. His book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality argues that phrases like freedom of expression have been hacked by authoritarian leaders and governments like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

Authoritarians use freedom of speech as an excuse to spread massive amounts of disinformation at the click of a button, while employing online mobs and troll farms to drown out and intimidate critical voices and obscure truth. This constitutes a sort of censorship through noise, Pomerantsev and two others wrote in a recent article for the London School of Economics Institute of Global Affairs, where he is a visiting senior fellow.

But countering autocrats doesnt have to mean removing the posts of ordinary people or taking them off their preferred social media platforms, he said, which has become a growing concern among many Republicans.

We thought that for a long time, the federal government is infuriating, Tucker Carlson said on Fox News Wednesday. The bigger threat to your family turned out to be huge publicly held corporations, particularly the tech monopolies.

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In fact, focus on censorship and cancel culture actually distracts from solving the problem of disinformation and all the chaos and confusion and real-world harm it brings with it in a way that preserves free speech, Pomerantsev said.

A lot of the virality is amplified artificially. Thats kind of how a lot of these platforms were designed, he said. That kind of artificial amplification I think really has to end.

Fake amplification everything from gaming algorithms and search engine optimization through to amplification through coordinated inauthentic activity I think that probably has to end if the internet is going to be a just reflection of society and not this kind of weird funhouse mirror that distorts everything, Pomerantsev said.

One of the first steps toward reducing disinformation is algorithm transparency: revealing how the social media and Big Tech companies engineer which information rises to the top and is seen by large numbers of people. Google, Facebook and TikTok have all taken some recent steps in this direction, Axios reported this week, but it was voluntary and most experts think this issue needs to be overseen by government regulators.

When Trumps people would say, Google pushes conservative views right down, liberal news up, we dont know because Google has not shown anyone its formulas that shape search results, Pomerantsev said. Thats ridiculous.

Carlson addressed the same root cause on his show. Twitter refuses to release data on who it bans, he said.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., sent letters to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in late January urging the companies to address the fundamental design features of their social networks that facilitate the spread of extreme, radicalizing content to their users. The letters were co-signed by 38 other House Democrats.

The lawmakers drew a straight line between the focus of social media companies on maximizing user engagement and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former presidents lies about the 2020 election.

The rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier this month were radicalized in part in digital echo chambers that these platforms designed, built, and maintained, and that the platforms are partially responsible for undermining our shared sense of objective reality, for intensifying fringe political beliefs, for facilitating connections between extremists, leading some of them to commit real-world, physical violence, Malinowski and Eshoo wrote.

The lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal investigation from last May that revealed Facebook knew in 2018 that its algorithms sometimes radicalized its users, but did not take action to reduce this because it would reduce profits. Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness, a presentation created internally said, noting that the company was serving more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

Malinowski and Eshoo have proposed a change to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act a law targeted for reform by conservatives as well that would hold tech companies accountable for content they proactively promote for business reasons, if doing so leads to specific offline harms.

Malinowski said in a hearing this week that this is a solution that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. We can believe that the biggest problem is on the right, on the far right or on the far left it doesnt matter. We can debate that. Whichever of those things you believe you should be for this, because the mechanism works the same way. It pushes people on the left further left. It pushes people on the right further right, until they reach an extreme.

Pomerantsev pointed to the United Kingdoms approach, which says in his words that companies have to think about the harms they cause, and those harms could be around public health or some forms of personal abuse.

And the question is what are the companies doing almost like in a health and safety kind of regime to mitigate that? So are their algorithms making it too easy for people to bully others or to harass them? Pomerantsev said. Are the way their systems are designed making it too easy to spread this information thats dangerous to peoples health?

The British have said there needs to be a regulator thats making a judgment about whether theyre doing enough around those issues, and are working to set up a system in which Ofcom, its communications regulator, could issue fines if the companies are found at fault.

The tech companies have lobbied the British government against giving Ofcom punitive regulatory powers.

But as Pomerantsev wrote in his book and expounded on in his interview with Yahoo News, the Big Tech companies have acquired so much information about their users which is most people that there is a real question about whether they are infringing upon freedom of thought.

To some degree our private thoughts, creative impulses, and senses of self are shaped by information forces greater than ourselves, he wrote in This Is Not Propaganda.

Are they actually invading your freedom of thought? Are they actually crossing the line of you, and then using it against you? he said. What is that line of our unconscious that deserves to be protected?

____

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To avoid online censorship, government must force Big Tech to be more transparent, expert says - Yahoo News

Big Tech stocks are bouncing back.

The Invesco QQQ Trust has climbed over 4% this week, led by shares of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet and Microsoft.

After roughly six months of sideways trading, this is likely the start of a broader push higher for the group, two market analysts told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Tuesday.

"In 2020, obviously so many of the sectors just got pummeled, and particularly industrials and consumer discretionary. But communications actually didn't fall by as much ... and [information technology] actually expanded their earnings-per-share growth last year," said Gina Sanchez, founder and CEO of Chantico Global.

Though all six are broadly considered tech stocks, only Apple and Microsoft are in the S&P 500's technology sector. Alphabet, Facebook and Netflix are in its communication services sector, while Amazon is in the consumer discretionary sector.

"Investors are looking for value and there are not a lot of places where you didn't get a lot of excessive [price-to-earnings] expansion with the exception of consumer discretionary, but also, interestingly, communications and technology," said Sanchez, also chief market strategist at Lido Advisors.

She noted that 2021 earnings expectations for the communication and tech sectors were 24% and 28%, respectively.

"We think that, in fact, they represent an interesting opportunity going forward with their earnings potential," Sanchez said.

All six names appear to have more runway, particularly given the strength of the current earnings season, said Mark Tepper, president and CEO of Strategic Wealth Partners.

Alphabet and Amazon shares jumped in after-hours trading on Tuesday following the companies' fourth-quarter earnings reports. In Wednesday's premarket, Alphabet was up 7% but Amazon was only slightly higher as investors mulled Jeff Bezos' announcement that he plans to step down as CEO.

"When you look at every single one of these companies, all of these companies were strong before Covid, they all got stronger during Covid and they're going to be strong long after we stop talking about Covid," Tepper told CNBC. "The runway wasn't short, it's long. I do believe there's more gains to come."

While his firm owns all six Big Tech names, Tepper said its positions in them are weighted less than the benchmark, the Russell 3000.

"We are finding more value down the cap spectrum a little bit. That's where we're putting new money to work, and one of the names we're talking about is Apple," he said. "The great way to potentially play that is to look at one of their suppliers, which is Knowles."

A roughly $1.85 billion electronics manufacturer, Knowles makes acoustic equipment for consumer devices such as Apple's AirPods, and its stock could soon play catch-up, Tepper said.

"Look at the performance between Knowles and Apple. Knowles has underperformed Apple by 75% over the last year," he said. "I think you can get some catch-up in a company like that."

Disclosure: Tepper and Strategic Wealth Partners own shares of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet and Microsoft.

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Three ways investors can play Big Tech on the back of earnings - CNBC

Rob Larew and Diana Moss Published 11:45 a.m. CT Feb. 5, 2021

Consolidation has given a few large companies control of proprietary, multi-level systems of traits, seeds, agrochemicals and digital technology.(Photo: Jessica Reilly, AP)

Amid Congressional investigation and federal, state and privateantitrust cases, all eyes are on Big Tech. The step up in antitrust enforcement against the digital technology behemoths and their alleged abuses of market power is, by all accounts, good news. Successful cases could restore competition, which would benefit smaller businesses and American consumers alike. And after decades ofunder-enforcement of the antitrust lawsin the United States, these cases could deliver some base hitsand even home runsfor a critical area of law enforcement.

But the outsized media, political and social attention paid to the tech industry has diverted focus from other important sectors. There are monopolies and domestic cartels elsewherein healthcare,pharmaceuticals, media and communications, as well as food and agriculture. These industries produce goods and services that are essential to the health, safety and well-being of consumers, and even to our national security, which is why antitrust laws must be enforced against violations in these sectors, too.

The food system has been particularly fertile ground for rising concentration, the emergence of dominant firms and formation of domestic cartels. Some of the largest players have been allowed to engage in anticompetitive mergers and practices that are as serious, if not more so, than those of which Big Tech stands accused.

Rob Larew(Photo: NFU)

Much like their counterparts in the tech sector, many of the largest food and agriculture corporations haveacquired their way to dominanceby gobbling up rival businesses. This has occurred across the food system, including digital farming startups, biotechnology firms, food manufacturers,flour millers, farm machinery manufacturers and grocery store chains. But nowhere has it been more pronounced than agricultural inputs.

In acquiring competitors both small and large, the six biggest agricultural biotechnology firms collapsed rapidly into the Big ThreeBayer, DuPont and ChemChina. This wave of consolidation, which was met withlittle resistancefrom antitrust authorities, gave these corporations control of proprietary,multi-level systemsof traits, seeds, agrochemicals and digital technology that limit farmers choices and lock them into limited cropping systems.

But some parts of the agricultural sector are rife with other damaging antitrust violations that we havent seen in Big Tech. This includes alleged conspiracies to fix prices and allocate marketspractices that are made possible by high levels of consolidation and concentration.

One of the most notable examples of this is in beef packing, where thetop four firms now control about 85 percent of the national market. Given the market power that the packers possess, it comes as no surprise that they have allegedly abused it:On multiple occasions, these packers have been accused of colludingto pay ranchers less for cattle and charge consumers more for beef.

Diana Moss(Photo: American Antitrust Institute)

However, this behavior isnt unique to the beef-packing sector. Similar allegations of price fixing have been leveled against tuna, chicken, turkey, egg, pork and peanut producers, among others. These cartels are especially egregious because processors allegedly collude on both the sell and buy sides, hurting both farmers and consumersincluding independent restaurants and grocery stores.

Beyond anticompetitive practices, rising concentration has implications for our national food security. Concentration-driven bottlenecks along the supply chain make the entire food system vulnerable to disruption, a fact that has become painfully obvious during the pandemic. Following a rash of COVID-19 outbreaks at meatpacking plants, national meat processing capacity declined bynearly half, resulting insupply chain breakdowns and price gouging that affected millions of Americansmany of whom were already experiencing food insecurity.

If disruption in the food supply system werent enough, the communities that support our food system are also at risk.Foreign companies now owna non-trivial portion of the United States farmland and food system. These entities not only resist food labeling and regulations that protect and inform consumers, they also take jobs and resources out of rural communities, accelerating social and economic decline and suppressing the growth of independent businesses that would contribute to revitalization.

Kudos to antitrust enforcers for finally taking aim at Big Tech. Monopolization casesif they produce meaningful resultswill improve the welfare of hundreds of millions of people that engage in online search, social networking and shopping. But we should not stop there. Americans depend on a safe, functional and resilient food system at least as much as they depend on their social medianetworks or ability to search the internet. Antitrust enforcers must turn their attention there next.

Rob Larew is president of National Farmers Union, which represents 200,000 family farmers and ranchers across the country.

Dr. Diana Moss is the president of the American Antitrust Institute, which is devoted to promoting competition that protects consumers, businesses and society.

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Dont stop at big tech we need to bust big agriculture, too - Wisconsin State Farmer