Last week, Meta was fined €800m over “abusive practices” that gave its Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage, one of several lawsuits either live or recently settled claiming big tech firms are creating monopolies and stifling competition. To face up to these tech monopolies, challenger brands have to constantly innovate in order to gain a toe-hold. Allowing fair competition is crucial to ensuring continued innovation and allowing the best products and solutions to reach the market.
The search industry is a great example, with Google recently winning its appeal against a €1.5bn EU competition fine. As Wired highlights, Microsoft and Google combined own approximately 95% of the global search industry outside of China. That’s not stopping disruptive search engine brands Ecosia and Qwant from teaming up to combat the reliance on big tech, while ensuring stronger rankings for sustainable businesses.
Whether or not they’re successful, the impact that search engines tailored for particular audiences, geographies or even social identities could have on the market highlights the importance of competition. It creates the ecosystem that disruptive brands need to innovate and challenge big business.
What does the data say?
- Harvard Business Review suggests as many as 90% of innovation projects fail, while a VMWare study shows 70% of businesses admit to struggling with innovation due to an inability to use data effectively.
- UN Trade & Development data shows 90% of digital revenue is generated by big tech giants in the US and China.
- Roxhill data analysed by Antidote shows 97 UK journalists have written 219 articles on big tech competition laws in 2024.
Competition and the innovation it brings isn’t new, of course. Many brands that are now household names started as a reaction to outdated approaches by larger businesses.
Take Airbnb for example. It was founded in 2007 with the aim of disrupting the hotel and tourism industry by creating a peer-to-peer marketplace for renting out homes to tourists. I’m sure even the founders didn’t foresee quite how big a step-change it would be in the way consumers plan trips, let alone the major hotel chains. In just 17 years, it’s gone from an idea to a publicly traded company worth more than $85bn.
In the comms space, Zoom is a more recent example of a disruptor brand successfully usurping an industry goliath. It’s hard to imagine now, but prior to the pandemic, Microsoft-owned Skype was the market leader in desktop-based video conferencing. Regular updates to the platform were minimal, so when the world was suddenly locked down overnight, its shortcomings were quickly realised. Zoom’s freemium model and focus on a simple, reliable, high-quality video over low-bandwidth made it accessible to all - whether it was used for a third family quiz of the week, or to allow business colleagues to remain connected around the clock.
This is why Antidote prides itself on working with innovators. We’re supporting adtech firm Quantcast in its bid to drive engagement throughout the open internet, rather than walled gardens monopolising the online world. We’re also responsible for the MacRobert Award comms campaign, celebrating the best of UK innovation every year, whether from start-ups, spin-outs, scale-ups or some of the largest businesses in the world. It's a similar story with our work on the Veuve Clicquot Bold Awards, recognising the women that are changing the world we live in through the ground-breaking companies they lead.
I could easily fill another ten blog posts covering examples of innovations that have transformed the world as we know it (don’t worry, I’m not going to). It does hit on an important point though - competition is absolutely vital. That doesn’t mean the tech giants should be banished. Far from it; they’re a vital part of the innovation ecosystem. In fact, both Ecosia and Qwant rely on Bing’s search APIs to function, while the former also uses Google’s search results.
However, big tech firms are driven to continue innovating by disruptive challenger brands entering the market with fresh ideas, striving to do things better, faster or cheaper. Competition and innovation go hand in hand, and we must ensure that this continues long into the future.
Come back for next week’s Your Weekly Antidote, another dose of data-driven news analysis on one of the biggest stories of the week from your favourite comms tech agency.
