TLDR: Amnesty International has released a landmark briefing, ‘Breaking up with Big Tech,’ on August 28, 2025, calling on governments worldwide to regulate the immense power of the ‘big five’ tech companies—Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple—to protect fundamental human rights. The report highlights how their unchecked influence across digital sectors, including emerging AI, poses severe risks to privacy, non-discrimination, and freedom of expression, advocating for potential break-ups to foster a fairer online environment.
Amnesty International today launched a critical new briefing, ‘Breaking up with Big Tech,’ on August 28, 2025, urging governments globally to take decisive action to rein in the overwhelming power of major technology corporations. The human rights organization asserts that the dominance of the so-called ‘big five’—Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple—poses an urgent threat to fundamental human rights, including privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of opinion, and access to information.
This briefing marks the first time Amnesty International has published a report of this nature, underscoring the gravity of the issue. It details how these tech giants have built and maintained their extraordinary influence over the digital infrastructure that shapes modern life, from search engines and social media to app stores and cloud computing. Alarmingly, the report also highlights their ongoing efforts to consolidate this power further in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.
Hannah Storey, Amnesty International’s Advocacy and Policy Adviser on Technology and Human Rights, emphasized the critical nature of the situation, stating, ‘These few companies act as digital landlords who determine the shape and form of our online interaction.’ She added, ‘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.’
The report provides stark examples of the real-world consequences of unchecked Big Tech power, referencing Amnesty’s investigations into Facebook’s alleged role in the Tigray war in Ethiopia and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. These cases demonstrate how the failure to address the dominance of these platforms can lead to devastating offline outcomes. In many countries, participation in daily life, from education and work to banking and communication, has become inextricably linked to these platforms, granting them immense power to influence public discourse and control information flows.
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Amnesty International sent a summary of its findings to Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple on August 12, 2025. While Meta and Microsoft provided written responses, Google, Amazon, and Apple had not responded by the time of the briefing’s publication. The organization calls on regulators worldwide to integrate human rights risks into merger reviews and competition probes, advocating for a human rights-based approach to competition law and market power. The briefing warns that ‘The unchecked dominance of these companies poses one of the greatest threats to human rights in the digital age,’ concluding that ‘Breaking up Big Tech is not just about competition – it’s about democracy, justice and human dignity.’
