As the United States and other nations grapple with the fallout from our current digital transformation, Big Tech Dynasties offers a timely and much-needed new perspective, paying particular attention to Australia's emergence as an unlikely leader, about this moment of intensified global concern about the power of large technology firms.

Tech giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, while products of platform capitalism, are inherently undemocratic due to their dynastic character. Like many of the historical dynasties, the Big Tech companies sustain their positions of dominance through three interlocking forces: economic management, mythology, and succession. Big Tech rules economically by governing global trade and communication networks and controlling the critical resources of our time-data, platforms, and cloud computing. It legitimates its authority through founder stories and an ideology of innovation that frames private power as moral and inevitable, and democratic constraint as unwise and unnecessary. As a result, it preserves its power across generations, leadership changes, and technological shifts.

In Big Tech Dynasties, Joanne Gray traces how we arrived at this moment and the growing democratic threat Big Tech poses. This treatise also explains how democracies are beginning to push back. It presents an agenda for other nations to reclaim democratic control in the digital era, starting with everyone becoming a little more Australian about it.