Who Owns You?

OMXUS Research Series — this paper of 33

The kitchen-table version of (Applebee & Combe, 2026, "Platform Gatekeeping")

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Imagine your Google account disappeared tomorrow. Not deactivated — gone.

Your email — gone. Every account that uses "Sign in with Google" — locked. Your photos from the last decade — gone. Your calendar, your contacts, your documents — gone. Your two-factor authentication — gone, which means every other account protected by it is also gone. If you have an Android phone, it's a brick.

You didn't die. But try to prove you exist.

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The Five Companies That Own Your Identity

Google — 1.8 billion accounts. They have your email, your searches, your location history, your photos, your voice recordings, and your authentication to everything else. Revenue: $307 billion/year. From selling predictions about you.

Apple — 2.2 billion devices. They can remotely disable your phone, remove apps you paid for, block you from installing software they don't approve of, and revoke your purchases. Revenue: $383 billion/year. Including a 30% tax on every app.

Meta — 3.7 billion users. That's 46% of all humans. They hold your relationships, your messages, your community groups. In countries where WhatsApp is how people communicate, a Meta outage is a national emergency. Revenue: $135 billion/year. From your social graph.

GitHub — 100 million developers. Your code, your professional history, your portfolio. In 2019 they blocked developers in Iran, Syria, and Cuba. Not for anything they did — for where they were born. Owned by Microsoft.

Microsoft — 1.2 billion Office users. Your employer uses Microsoft. Microsoft controls your work email, documents, and login. Your job depends on your Microsoft account. Your rent depends on your job. Revenue: $212 bi