Despite the backlash from politicians and the press, most Americans view big tech favorably
Matt Rosoff / CNBC : Tweets: @jeffjohnroberts and @cnbc Tweets: Jeff Roberts / @jeffjohnroberts : Reality check: 88% of public views GOOG favorably, 72% for AMZN http://www.cnbc.com/... <- hurdle for anti-trust crowd @cnbc : Here's why the public isn't buying into an anti-tech campaign based on false premises http://cnbc.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In October 2017, as politicians and the press escalated their anti-tech rhetoric, polling showed the campaign hadn't reached the public: 88% of Americans viewed Google favorably and 72% Amazon. The same month, broader surveys of US sentiment toward big tech firms were probing trust, privacy, and news accuracy — the fault lines where the backlash was actually forming.
The gap matters because regulatory pressure was building anyway: by early 2018 a poll found 55% of US adults favored government regulation of big tech, up from 40% just months earlier. Public affection for the products was never the same thing as comfort with the companies' power.
First-order effects
- Politicians betting on an anti-tech platform face a hurdle: their base uses and likes these products, so criticism has to rest on premises like privacy and market power that polls show the public doesn't yet share.
- Google and Amazon enter any regulatory fight with strong consumer goodwill intact — a reputational asset that insulates them in the court of public opinion even as legal scrutiny mounts.
Second-order effects
- Regulators and lawmakers can't count on consumer sentiment to carry antitrust cases, so the case for action shifts to economic-power arguments — the framing behind later efforts like the DOJ's Google suit, which drew only 48% support among likely voters while 62% called big tech's economic power a problem.
- Firms whose favorability erodes lose that insulation first: Facebook's slide to 66% favorable by 2021, per a later survey showing its decline against Apple and Amazon, made it the more politically exposed target even as rivals stayed popular.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US tech policy splits along two tracks: brand favorability shields individual products while aggregate concern about platform power drives structural remedies — meaning antitrust outcomes depend less on how much consumers like a company than on how its market conduct is framed.
- The divergence also forces a measurement shift for both parties and platforms: sentiment tracking of individual brands becomes a poor proxy for regulatory risk, pushing attention toward trust and privacy metrics like those in the companion surveys of tech-industry sentiment.
The trend: Consumer favorability toward big tech platforms is decoupling from public support for regulating them, letting antitrust momentum grow even where brand approval stays high.