Big Tech and Human Rights: Power Without Boundaries

This week’s Field Notes highlight a central shift: Big Tech is no longer just shaping technology, it is shaping the conditions under which human rights are experienced. Across multiple analyses, a consistent pattern emerges. Platforms control access to information, economic participation, and public discourse, yet accountability mechanisms remain weak.

Data shows this imbalance clearly. Major tech companies continue to score below 50% in human rights accountability benchmarks, while AI systems expand rapidly without transparent oversight. At the same time, reports on generative AI reveal that risks are embedded across the entire value chain, from exploited data labor to biased outputs, showing that harm is not isolated but systemic.

What connects these findings is a deeper governance issue. Big Tech operates as infrastructure, but without the responsibilities typically expected of institutions with such power. Regulation often focuses on individual companies or products, while the underlying systems, data extraction, algorithmic control, and platform dependency, remain intact.

This reframes the debate. The problem is no longer whether Big Tech has influence, but how that influence is structured and distributed. When access to information, work, and expression depends on a few platforms, rights become conditional rather than guaranteed.

If digital systems now function as spaces where rights are exercised, then who is responsible for ensuring those rights are protected within them?