With Facebook co-opting news media, Amazon controlling book sales, Netflix and Youtube taking over video, and the smartphone industry directed by Apple and Google, there is a global backdrop of social anxiety, and it’s caused by US tech giants. European governments have led an effort to limit the reach of tech companies through privacy regulation and antitrust investigations. “The European efforts are just a taste of a coming global freak-out over the power of the American tech industry…What is happening in Europe is playing out in China, India and Brazil and across much of the rest of the globe, as well,” writes Farhad Manjoo for the New York Times. Coining the term “The Frightful Five” in reference to Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, Manjoo says these companies have created a set of inescapable tech platforms that govern much of the business world. The five have grown expansive in their business aims and invincible to just about any competition.

For all the disruptions, good and bad, the Frightful Five are founded and headquartered in America, and espouse American values like free trade, free expression and a skepticism of regulation. In the rest of the world, however, the Americanness of the Five is seen as a reason of fear, not comfort. The bigger they get, the less room they leave for domestic competition, and more room they leave for spying by the US government, says Manjoo. Globally, they could get so entrenched in world economies that they impose their own laws.