Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

With more trade and more urbanization comes more wealth. Lots of humanities riches have

come from interacting more closely. So have all of it epidemics. We take a long trip

through the history of hygiene and its connection to economic growth.

And a summer holiday in Dubai is a hard sell. It gets so hot you can cook a frozen pizza

in a parked car. But now it has a handle on the pandemic, the city is

luring visitors for the steamy season. Don't worry, the national carrier will

ensure you for any COVID-19-related bills.

First up though.

Big tech companies are under pressure. Simply put, they have too much power.

This week the heads of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google's parent company Alphabet

were summoned to answer questions in Congress.

Each platform is a bottleneck for a key channel of distribution.

Where they control access to information or to a marketplace, these platforms had

the incentive and ability to exploit this power.

On this issue, as on few others, Republicans and Democrats agree, big tech's influence

is too broad. In the five hour hearing, the executives were grilled on everything

from hobbling the competition to suppressing free speech. Alphabet's chief executive

Sundar Pachai faced questions from representative Val Demings on Google steadily shifting its privacy policy.

Practically, this decision meant that your company would now combine, for example,

all of my data on Google, my search history, my location from Google Maps,

...