The Global Technology Sector as a Commercial Determinant of Health

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the expansion of Big Tech—the dominant American technology companies—into public health policy and practice, with the pandemic contributing to a vacuum of power and services that corporations have moved aggressively to exploit. Despite these trends, the influence of the global technology sector as a commercial determinant of health has largely been overlooked. This chapter provides brief case studies from research of three companies—Meta, Google, and GoFundMe—and the diverse impacts they are having on public health systems. Although in no way a comprehensive look at the technology sector as a contributor to commercial determinants of health, these three cases provide lessons about the strategies that technology companies use to transform and disrupt health systems and help clarify the longer term implications for population health that warrant further in-depth research.