Commentary The Big Five—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—essentially control America. In the United States, the pandemic resulted in the permanent closure of 200,000 businesses. People lost their jobs, their livelihoods, and too many lost their lives. But the pandemic didn’t affect Big Tech. In fact, rather perversely, it seems to have helped. Amazon just released its first quarterly report of 2021. The company’s net income is up by 48.4 percent. Total revenue is up by 27.2 percent. Apple, spearheaded by Tim Cook, has seen its revenue soar by 54 percent to $89.6 billion. With Facebook, as Reuters recently reported, “total revenue, which primarily consists of ad sales, rose about 56 percent to $29.08 billion in the second quarter from $18.69 billion a year earlier.” Compared with last year’s first-quarter report, Google’s overall revenue increased by 34.2 percent. Last year, the company reported $41.2 in revenue; this year, it reported $55.3 billion. With a market value of $2.15 trillion, Microsoft isn’t suffering, either. …