Taming the Titans: A Podcast about Big Tech and Human Rights

"How do the titans of tech limit and manipulate our freedom of expression online?"



"Taming the Titans", produced by ARTICLE 19, is a podcast series on big tech and human rights. Presented by journalist Emily Hart, it seeks to answer questions like: How did a handful of companies come to dominate our digital lives? What does it mean for our human rights and our societies? What can we do to get that power back, and can competition law empower us to tame these titans?



Over five episodes, Emily talks to a variety of international experts, analysing the power wielded by social media and search engine companies, highlighting the issues of growing censorship, surveillance and data collection - and examining what civil society can do to bring Big Tech back down to size.



Although most of what is happening around big tech is taking place in Europe and the United States, ARTICLE 19 views Latin America as one of the next key battlegrounds - a vast market for online services and a very different backdrop for this debate. For each episode, the podcasts, therefore, feature one expert from Europe, where the conversation is crystallising into a new legislative project - the Digital Markets Act - and one from Latin America, where the conversation is gaining force.



The episodes, which are between 30 and 40 minutes long, are as follows:

• Episode 1: The March to Monopoly - This first episode asks: How did digital power become so concentrated in the hands of the (extremely) few, who let it happen, and what is being done about it? Emily Hart speaks to investigative journalist Nick Shaxson and ARTICLE 19's Martha Tudón, who leads work on digital rights in Mexico and Central America, about how a handful of companies, including Meta, Alphabet, and Twitter, now hold the keys to the internet, and about how we can get them back. Click here to listen to this podcast.
• Episode 2: From Big Tech to Titan Tech - This podcast looks into the world of social media companies and search engines - and the power they exercise over our online lives and our human rights. Emily Hart is joined by Carolina Botero of Colombian digital rights campaign Karisma and regulation expert Dr. Liza Luffdal Gormsen, who look at regulation and talk about whether the models currently emerging in Europe can work in other contexts, given the radically different factors at play. Click here to listen to this podcast.
• Episode 3: Hope on the Horizon - This episode examines bringing big tech down to size and using regulation to do it. Emily Hart is joined by Argentinian free speech expert Agustina del Campo and ARTICLE 19's Maria Luisa Stasi, who leads the organisation's work on law and policy for digital markets. They explore Europe's Digital Markets Act, which is considered to be the most ambitious legislation to date to tackle the issues of power concentration and anti-competitive behaviours in digital markets. Click here to listen to this podcast.
• Episode 4: Big Brother vs Big Other - The 20th century birthed "Big Brother", an omnipresent surveillance state, but the 21st century's digital surveillance capacities have created a "Big Other": online corporations watching humanity more closely than any state apparatus ever has. The difference is that people put the Big Other in their own pockets and homes. For this episode, Emily Hart is joined by Luis Fernando García, Executive Director and co-founder of Mexican digital rights organisation R3D, and Tomaso Falchetta, who leads Privacy International's global policy engagement. They dig into issues of online privacy and surveillance and answer questions such as: How much do we know about the data being collected on us? Why does it matter to our human rights and democracies? What can we do about it? Click here to listen to this podcast.
• Episode 5: Momentum Is Building - So Where Now? - This episode focuses on a crucial third force in the discussion: civil society - who do not have an easy time advocating for human and democratic rights and for the good of societies in the face of powerful, secretive companies with huge budgets for lobbying and influence in very high places. The experts in this discussion come from two consumer rights organisations (one from each side of the Atlantic): Vanessa Turner of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and Camila Leite Contri of the Brazilian Institute of Consumers Protection. In light of the fact that legislators and regulators in different parts of the world will need to adapt emerging regulatory tools and concepts to their own context and markets, the discussion seeks to answer the following questions: What can we learn from the process of negotiations around the Digital Markets Act in Europe, and how can it be replicated in other contexts? Is it even the right template? How can we weave together a global civil society to make sure people's voices are really heard in this growing conversation? Click here to listen to this podcast.