Washington, DC — The flurry of Big Tech mergers and acquisitions often overlooks how tech consolidation limits new technologies, stifles innovation, and harms employees.

A new group – NextGen Competition (nextgencomp.tech) – has launched with the goal of promoting greater transparency and accountability in the tech industry. NextGen Competition supports a robust and competitive technology ecosystem and opposes anti-competitive business practices that undermine worker protections, threaten data privacy, and limit consumer choice. The new group is led by Executive Director George Rakis, a long-time veteran of national politics and pro-worker policymaking.

"Our organization will shine a spotlight on the growing market dominance of a very small number of industry players in the metaverse, video gaming, streaming, and surveillance advertising space," said Rakis. "Our focus is to protect consumers and employees while holding Big Tech accountable for business practices that violate consumer privacy, limit consumer choice, hinder a workers’ ability to unionize, encourage and enable worker harassment, and empower dictators and despots."

In light of the FTC announcement last week, NextGen Competition plans to draw public attention to the planned acquisition of Activision-Blizzard by tech giant Microsoft and to shine a spotlight on its numerous labor and privacy issues that have gone unaddressed. Beyond both companies' poor records of protecting workers, NextGen Competition will focus on how this acquisition would boost Microsoft's rapidly growing and sophisticated surveillance advertising network. This network, along with Microsoft's foothold in the cloud, the metaverse, and an ad partnership with Netflix, raises serious consumer protection and privacy concerns.

"We're looking beyond the competition questions about popular Activision games like Call of Duty,” continued Rakis. “NextGen Competition will educate policymakers and the public on both companies’ failure to address significant cases of worker harassment, sexism, and allegations of ongoing union busting. Microsoft has been unwilling or unable to protect workers at Activision, has failed to offer a plan to address the notorious culture of gender-based worker harassment and sexism, and instead has offered CEO Bobby Kotick a golden parachute while he continues his union busting and anti-worker antics."

About NextGen Competition

Our mission is to support a robust and competitive technology ecosystem by opposing anti-competitive business practices and promoting greater industry accountability. Specifically, we oppose consolidation in the industry that undermines worker protections and employer accountability, threatens data privacy and security, encourages market concentration, and limits consumer choice. NextGen Competition intends to work with a broad coalition of unions and public interest partners as it seeks to oppose anti-competitive business practices.