Apple, Facebook and Google will feel the pinch as the world gets serious about privacy and tax concerns

Societies are questioning the role that these companies play in people’s lives

This is a big week for anyone seeking to gauge the health of high-tech America. On Tuesday we had Apple report its quarterly results. Microsoft and Facebook report later today, and Amazon tomorrow. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reports next week.

It is obviously a huge financial story, for a lot of people are making – and losing – millions of dollars on their investments. These are the most valuable companies in the world, with Microsoft now top of the league, closely followed by Amazon. Apple, which last autumn pipped them all to become the first trillion dollar company, has now slipped back and is now worth “only” $742bn (£568bn).

It is also an economic story, for if growth slows in high-tech America that is both a signal of a wider slowdown and one of the causes of it.

But it is also a story about society, not just American society, but about the choices people all over the world make in their daily lives. These companies have, for better or worse, transformed all our lives over the past 20 years. Imagine a world without the smartphone, and all the services that have sprung from that: no Uber, no Waze, Google Maps, no FaceTime, no WhatsApp.

But now it is pushback time. All around the world, societies are questioning the role the high-tech giants play in people’s lives. Does the scrutiny mean their glory days might be over?

Before going any further it is important to note that these companies are all very different. Apple is principally a product company, heavily reliant on the iPhone. Microsoft has the massive installed base of operating systems on the world’s computers, but now depends increasingly on cloud services to companies. Amazon is logistics, but also has a service business for companies. And Google and Facebook live off the advertising revenue they generate from the access to the people who use them.

The common theme – and this goes for other firms too, such as Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla – is that their power is troubling people. They are all disrupters, and if you disrupt things you will make enemies.

There is so much going on that to keep things manageable let’s divide the worries into four categories: privacy; monopoly/abuse of market position; treatment of employees/associates; and tax. A (necessarily) quick word about each.

Privacy is the hot subject right now. Thus Facebook has just been clobbered for secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that allows the company to see all the phone and web visits the user makes. Google knows exactly where we are and what we are doing unless we figure out how to switch the tracking off. Amazon of course knows all about our purchases, and much more. Apple is this week fixing a flaw in FaceTime that allows an iPhone to listen into other people’s conversations – a flaw discovered by 14-year-old Grant Thompson.

One problem about privacy is that people in different countries have different ideas as to what should be private and what not. Take the UK. Libel laws are among the most restrictive in the world, so the misdemeanours of the rich and famous are kept from prying eyes. But UK citizens’ movements are tracked by an estimated four million surveillance cameras, and there is very little protest about that.

Another problem is unintended consequences. Europe’s GDPR legislation has meant that people in the EU cannot view a lot of US news sites, including those of some major newspapers. Google has just been hit with a €50m fine for breaching EU regulations, the largest fine so far. You can understand why some US news outlets feel the European market is not worth trying to serve.

Monopoly and abuse of commercial power is as old as commerce itself, and the high-tech companies, like the steel and oil barons of a century ago, have been under pressure to be broken up or regulated. What is new is that we now have global monopolies and oligopolies, whereas we only have experience of how to cope with national ones. In practice, since these companies are all American, US legislators are in the lead and the rest of us will have to fall in line. Europe is a big enough market to have some influence, but note that the French pursued Google in the US, not in Ireland where its European headquarters is legally based.

Treatment of employees is a national issue, and the problem is not the location of the HQ but rather the definition of a working contract. The line between employee and contractor has become blurred by the gig economy, and will become more so.

And tax? Look, this will be tackled. It is a new version of an old problem. Manufacturing companies have used long transfer pricing (pricing components shipped across borders) to cut their tax bill, by making their profit in the place with the lowest taxes. What happens now is that the intellectual capital behind a product is located in the low-tax country and their businesses elsewhere pay a fee to employ that capital. This is fixable, but it takes time.

Pull all this together and what do you have? I think we are in the early stages of a 10-year squeeze on the high-tech world. The methods are disorganised and in some cases will be ineffective. But gradually the titans will find themselves increasingly constrained. Growth will tail off, and profitability will suffer. We may even start to catch a sniff of this shift from unbridled growth to incremental growth in the figures released by these companies over the next few days.