There’s ingenuity behind Apple’s great success. But we must guard against its might | Will Hutton

The more awesome our technological progress, the more our politicians take refuge in the familiar ideological categories of the 19th century. Last week, Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar corporation. It, like Amazon and Google hard on its heels, offers products and services that have transformed our lives. These companies’ financial and market powers are staggering. They are the new technopolists. But how are the great things they do to be curated and enhanced and how are the menaces to be contained?

What unites far left and far right is that neither ideology begins to provide answers. Even one of Shakespeare’s giddiest fools could see what a Jacob Rees-Mogg cannot: that such power requires countervailing force of equal scale that cannot be supplied by a nation state alone. It is the EU that can fine Google £3.8bn for abusing its position; the UK alone is defenceless. Meanwhile, the hard left is preoccupied with expensively nationalising assets that don’t need nationalising.

It is, in fairness, a bewilderment that is widespread. Data capitalism is creating companies of phenomenal power at phenomenal speed. Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Instagram, Deliveroo and others are transforming sector after sector of our economy and our very society. The high street is being hollowed out; the newspaper industry is on the edge; taxi services are becoming tethered to online digital platforms. Our tastes and preferences are digitised and sold behind our backs to commercial and political advertisers. Workers are turned into contractors, marshalled and managed by text messages. Taxes are avoided. Even our democracy is at risk.

It not as if the technopolists hide what they do. The world knows the trade-off offered by Google: we get free internet searches in exchange for allowing this unaccountable company to harvest our data. We may hate their size but their size allows Google to be the globe’s premier search engine, Amazon to offer its goods so cheaply and Facebook to be the ubiquitous social networking platform. We want these benefits, but we want fairness and accountability too.

The first line of resistance has to be an overhaul of the least glamorous and least talked about aspect of public policy – competition policy. It, like the political class, is rooted in a long-distant world. It is shaped by nation states, locked into the axioms of 19th-century economics, does not reckon that consumer welfare is also about promoting choice and innovation, and its enforcement processes are weak and slow.

Thus Google and Amazon bought up many small hi-tech companies that were potential insurgents that might have challenged them, a self-acknowledged “kill-in-the-crib” strategy. No national competition authority lifted a finger. Yet the breathtaking pace of growth of such insurgents is what defines our times. Today’s giant Apple was close to bankruptcy in the 1990s, when Facebook had yet to be invented.

The whole machinery needs a root-and-branch overhaul, as argued in Technopoly And What to Do About It, a paper produced by the thinktank ResPublica and Big Innovation Centre (which I co-founded). Competition needs to be policed supranationally (yet another area where Brexit Britain perforce will have to collaborate with the EU): small companies need to be able to band together to challenge technopoly; takeovers need to be rigorously examined and blocked to allow innovation to grow; enforcement needs to be tough.

That’s not all. There needs to be a parallel commitment to openness in how the private and public sectors govern themselves in the era of data capitalism. Data is the key ingredient of the 21st-century economy – as crucial as oil and electricity in earlier revolutions. There needs to be a new promise of openness and accountability in how it is used: if citizens are to allow their data to be aggregated and shared for public and private advantage, there must be cast-iron guarantees of how data is deployed, along with mechanisms to correct abuse.

Thus every company entrusted with the collection and dissemination of data should declare in their articles of association that their overriding purpose is to deliver public benefit, to create systems through which they are held to account and allow redress for grievance. Britain is not powerful enough by itself, but the EU should require all companies with such digital platforms to incorporate as public benefit corporations. This principle would extend to all those disseminating public information on any platform, thus committing to provide content that is true.

Donald Trump, according to the Washington Post, had by 1 June this year lied more than 3,000 times as president. He can counter that the assertion is fake news, with no trusted means for the media to fight back. In the face of this challenge, only a collective media commitment to truth telling as a constitutional commitment has any chance of turning the tide.

This is only the foothills of the digital revolution. Ahead lie the challenges of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Even some technopolist executives fear how less scrupulous rivals could exploit VR. The manipulation of opinion, so shocking in the Brexit referendum, could move on to another plane with addictive and compelling VR. And never forget China is deploying these self-same technologies to take Big Brother-style monitoring and control to blanket levels.

Too little of this has entered mainstream political debate. The heart of progressive politics is to wrestle with how to make capitalism – today’s capitalism, not some imagined past – serve the common good. It must do so again.

• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist