Addressing the Enabling Conditions for ProSocial Technology Markets

Note

In October 2024, GoodBot participated in ProSocial Tech Design Governance workshops in Brussels and Florence as part of its work with the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion. This policy brief emerged as GoodBot’s contributions to a draft of a “Blueprint for Prosocial Tech Design Regulation” and was incorporated into the final report.

May 10 2025 - By Renee Black

Digital and technologies operated by Big Tech companies present significant opportunities to benefit society and humanity, while also creating risks and harm. Big Tech dominance over flows of information, goods and services has led to the normalization of problematic business models and unethical design practices that have enabled sector dominance. These practices are incentivized and imitated by smaller companies seeking to keep pace. This reality inevitably creates a race to the bottom.

The result is both the accumulation of extreme shareholder wealth and corporate power benefiting a handful of dominant companies, and the externalization of risks and harms impacting communities, markets and democracies. These harms are absorbed largely by communities and under-resourced frontline organizations (e.g. schools, police, municipalities, etc.) that often lack resources and expertise to effectively respond while lacking power to address underlying structural factors and incentives that enable them. These factors combined mean that we are in a situation that is by definition unsustainable. 

Four decades of “laissez-faire” economics has been a significant enabling factor, leading to the consolidation of many businesses across the United States and other parts of the world. While this period began before the rise of technology, consolidation and growth have been supercharged in the platform era, with the largest companies in the world - such as Google and Facebook - growing via acquisitions and VC funding betting on future returns. In this context, a key strategy for many technology companies has been to offer products for free or low-cost in order to establish “network capture” effects which intentionally make it hard for new entrants to compete. Such practices often begin before companies have a clear understanding of business models and monetization strategies that will drive their products in the future, which can significantly change the experience for users. Indeed, in order to achieve the Return on Investments (ROI) expected by many VCs, technology companies often end up implementing similar monetization policies that lead to harmful outcomes. They enter into these strategies with full knowledge of the likely risks and harms they are unleashing and fail to take adequate steps to address those risks.

As companies have grown to unprecedented sizes, they have bought up value chains that create the enabling conditions for monopolies to take hold. Such conditions mean that other commercial actors along those value chains are at a structural disadvantage.

Indeed, dominant companies are known to wield market power to undermine competitors including by driving them out of business (such as by under pricing), controlling marketplaces in which they compete with other companies (such as app stores or online retail markets), aggressively pursuing acquisitions, pursuing litigation against competitors, and otherwise abusing their position to control and dominate markets.

The United States Federal Trade Commissioner (FTC) under Lina Khan pursued a number of important cases against companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon in response to such practices that led to market environments that lacked meaningful competition and where dominance has enabled conflicts-of-interest.

Market dominance can enable a range of antisocial outcomes. First, companies that wield such economic power also wield the resources to push back on litigation and other attempts to hold them accountable. Even when litigation is successful, the penalty against dominant companies is rarely significant enough to alter incentives and behavior, and instead are treated as a cost of doing business. 

Second, the ability to share information across different parts of the value chain in ways that competitors are unable to achieve means that companies can make decisions that both place them at a structural advantage and in which they can make choices that are conflict of interest with what is best for the markets, consumers and other vendors along those value chains. 

Third, companies that would seek to promote and use prosocial practices can struggle to gain market share and compete effectively with companies that use antisocial practices because they will be unable to monetize at the same level if they invest in ethical practices especially when competing against a dominant player. 

Fourth, a lack of mechanisms to independently review trust and safety claims by companies means that dominant players can use the language of responsibility without ever having to demonstrate that they adhere to these obligations through independent verification. This "responsibility washing” condition can make it very challenging for responsible players to compete with their performative peers. The Canadian Competition Bureau enacted Bill C-59 on Greenwashing in 2024 which recently led RBC to withdraw its claims on sustainability. Prosocial technologies are unlikely to attract the same level of investment and scale that might be achieved from large platforms who are less committed to responsibility. Competing against dishonest and misleading companies makes it challenging to compete effectively on responsibility.

Creating the enabling conditions for a prosocial marketplace requires attention and obligations on dominant players to ensure that their pursuit of growth and wealth is not anti-competitive by design and that it is implemented in a way that does not dissuade prosocial alternatives and create a “race to the bottom.”

To advance the potential space for prosocial technology markets, companies need first of all to be able to attract funding and resources in order to compete. Second, they require the ability to withstand efforts to prevent their companies from being acquired by dominant players seeking to prevent potential disruptors from taking market share. Third, they require market conditions where dominant players cannot use “responsibility washing” to convince misled publics about their safety relative to prosocial peers. Fourth, they require governments to hold companies accountable and to pursue meaningful fines when the largest platforms use their dominant position to prevent competition and pursue platform growth in ways that cause harm. 

Citation

Black, Renee, "Addressing the Enabling Conditions for ProSocial Technology Markets" GoodBot Society. May 10 2025. https://www.goodbot.ca/tech-policy/enabling-conditions