If 2022 was the year Big Tech was humbled, 2023 will be the year the halo truly falls. Amazon lost $1-trillion, Facebook lost 70% of its value as it tried to pivot to a virtual reality (VR) alternative future and Twitter, well, it got bought by Elon Musk. And chaos ensued and, at the time of writing, the story was still unfolding.

Musk’s irrational and impulsive decision to ban journalists who reported on his ongoing tiff with a teenager who tracks his private jet might have been the final nail. As is his habit, Musk created a poll to ask whether he should step down as Twitter CEO, in which 17 million people voted and 56% said he should. Immediately, he disputed the poll as bots may have voted.

Musk tweeted he would “resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

It’s safe to say 2023 will continue where this year left off, with the petulant antics of the no-longer-richest person in the world, and the continuing train crash of his overpriced $44-billion purchase of Twitter. This often juvenile, often querulous, and somewhat naive new owner is lurching from self-made crisis to spectacular own-goal. He even hinted at a war with Apple over what he called “a battle for the future of civilisation”.

In the same tweet, he added: “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

That is Silicon Valley hyperbole for: Apple owns the App Store and can get away with charging 30% fees because, well, it’s Apple. Facebook took it on, as did Spotify and Fortnite-maker Epic Games. Apple shrugs it off.

But arguably not for long. There is a strong possibility 2023 will see significant antitrust court cases against the FAANG com­panies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. US President Joe Biden strengthened the hands of key agencies, most notably Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The 32-year-old Columbia Law School professor is a fierce critic of Big Tech and its dominance.

She helped the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law in its 16-month investigation into these firms, and its scathing 450-page report, which found “once … scrappy, underdog startups” have “become the kind of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons”.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fierce critic of the monopolistic power of Big Tech, has said: “Apple, you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. Either they run the platform, or they play in the store. They don’t get to do both at the same time.”

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This duality – own the store and sell your own apps through it – is going to become harder for both Apple and Google to do for the App Store and Play Store respectively. Spotify is not alone in decrying the way Apple prioritises its own apps for iOS, with other developers crying foul over suspicions Apple prevents some apps from being in the store and then launches similar features in its own. Google has already been fined for demanding that smartphone manufacturers include its Play Store and other major apps – Gmail, Maps, Photos and Google Docs – when they install Android.

Amazon is also in lawmakers’ crosshairs for how it hoovers up its shoppers’ data and uses that to maintain dominance, say critics.

It runs the biggest online ecommerce store, where other merchants sell their wares, but so does Amazon itself – often to the disadvantage of smaller competitors.

“You can be an umpire, or you can be a player – but you can’t be both,” says Warren. Similarly, Amazon’s own brands often seem to appear higher in search results and it is also accused of plagiarising ideas from its own merchants. Expect much closer scrutiny of all of these monopolies, no matter how much they claim innocence.

Netflix’s plans to keep up its growth rate – which surged in the two years of Covid and has now returned to pre-lockdown levels – with an ad-supported offering (something it once vowed it would never do) and a gaming service, showing how much pressure the original video-on-demand service is under.

Streaming is going to go from strength to strength, but the landscape is ever more contested. With every broadcaster and media house launching its own, paid-for streaming service, there is too much supply for diminishing demand. After Netflix, there’s Disney+, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and MultiChoice’s Showmax.

Few people will subscribe to all and the herd will be thinned out.

MultiChoice is looking to a streaming future with a new play – based on that of the UK’s Sky – selling its DStv Glass products, high-end smart televisions that will be rented (DM168 has seen very competitive pricing suggestions) instead of bought outright. The TV rental will be included in the streaming bundle. This is a smart play.

But the biggest trend next year will be the momentum of TikTok and fears – especially from US law enforcement agencies – about the ability of its Chinese owner ByteDance to access Americans’ private data.

As fears over misinformation increase, particularly pro-China rhetoric, many US states have banned it from devices. And there are growing calls for an outright ban on the app in the US. “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better,” said Senator Mark Warner, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s co-chairman, and FBI director Christopher Wray told the US Congress he was “extremely concerned” about TikTok.

The New York Times summed it up: “TikTok became a diplomatic crisis.”

In the rest of social media, there is concern about how the world’s youngsters have flocked to the video-sharing app, which came of age during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has become the default for many Ukrainians to share war experiences, just as Telegram has replaced WhatsApp as the default messaging tool in eastern Europe.

With Musk’s unpredictable antics scaring off Twitter advertisers, it is suffering the same shifting advertising spend Facebook and Google have seen as marketers move their budgets to TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter are complaining in the same way the media has for the past decade as digital advertising follows the fish.

Musk tweeted last week, “as the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it”. Seemingly self-aware for once, he added: “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.