• The former CEO of Yum! Brands Inc. David Novak increased the company's market cap by $28 billion. 
• In the award-winning executive's new book "How Leaders Learn," Novak shares insights for leadership.
• He said learning how to get honesty from people around is important to combat delusion. 

Shortly after Wendy and I got engaged, I went to Louisville to meet her parents. She was anxious to know what kind of impression I'd made, so at the first opportunity, she pulled her mother aside and said, "So, what do you think?" At that moment, they could hear me trash-talking her two brothers, Jeff and Rick, as we played basketball in the driveway.

"Well," my future mother-in-law, Anne, replied, "he's a very loud man."

She was right. Wendy says I'm like a big puppy dog, jumping around, barking, and wagging its tail. When you're in a position of leadership, that kind of enthusiasm can get you into trouble because people confuse it with excessive optimism, even delusion. They can assume you don't want to hear about the bubble-bursting realities of a situation — even if all you want is the truth.

Here's an example: I'm incredibly proud of my podcast, "How Leaders Lead." I think the conversations are inspiring and helpful to leaders around the world. Ask me about it, and you'll hear (and see) my enthusiasm pour out. After building it for a year, we hired an experienced podcast producer and brand builder, Tim Schurrer, who is now the CEO of David Novak Leadership, to help us improve it. During one meeting, when we were still getting to know each other, I asked him how we could improve. I could tell he was hemming and hawing. He gave me vague answers. I finally said, "Tim, the only thing I care about is getting to the best possible product. What do you think we should do?" That made it safe for him to give me the reality: compared to other highly successful podcasts, he said, our intros and outros just weren't good enough. We weren't drawing people in with a big idea to get them excited, and we weren't leaving them with a clear takeaway. It was hurting our audience engagement. "OK," I said. "What do we do to fix it?" He gave us a better model, we implemented it right away, and it made our podcast better.

Active learners deal in reality. They recognize an essential truth: delusional people don't learn well. They work hard to follow the often repeated advice of my mentor at Yum!, Andy Pearson: learn to see the world the way it really is, not how you wish it to be. If you assume that the best ideas and soundest knowledge are based in reality, what are the chances that you're going to be open to them if you're clinging to what you wish rather than acknowledging what is? And how can you possibly know where or how to grow and learn if you don't know your starting point?

Unfortunately, we don't usually see the world the way it really is. Our brains create stories (rooted in those categories, templates, and heuristics I described in the last chapter) about everything we perceive, based on our experiences, desires, and expectations. Along the way, when information seems to be missing or contradictory, the brain fills in gaps or makes choices about what information to use or discard. (Surprise, surprise, it really likes information that proves the story right, a problem called confirmation bias.) An example that neuroscientists point to all the time is the divergent stories different people will tell after witnessing the same event. They'll swear that what they saw was the truth, even though it often isn't, or at least not the whole truth. Optical illusions are the visual manifestation of the brain filling in the gaps. The brain interprets the information it receives in a certain way, and we can't unsee it, even though we know it's not the truth or reality.

Basically, it's easy to be a little delusional. Long before neuroscientists could begin to describe how we process information and create meaning from it, great philosophers and thinkers knew it was a challenge. In the early twentieth century, the influential lawyer Clarence Darrow said, "Man does not live by truth, but by the illusions that his brain conceives."

So, what's an active learner to do? Well, here's what else Darrow said: "Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails." 

I'm a little more optimistic. I think we can get close to the truth in many situations. It starts by inviting more truth-tellers into your life who will keep orienting you to reality. But you can't make your perception of reality somebody else's responsibility (or base your judgments on their judgments). If you want to see the world the way it really is, you've got to hunt for the truth. You've got to chase it like all hell.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from "How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People" by David Novak with Lari Bishop. Copyright 2024 David C Novak. All rights reserved.

• Facebook's new strategy leans more into TikTok-like Discovery and less into friends and family.
• It wants to reach a young demographic that will like things like Marketplace and the Dating app.
• Don't roll your eyes — it just might work.

Meta just unveiled its plan for Facebook to win over a surprising demographic: Gen Z.

I say surprising because it's widely known that Facebook is "for old people" — many teens and young people think of it as something their mom or grandma uses. According to a 2023 Pew survey on teen internet use, only about a third of US teens ages 13-17 used Facebook. Compare that to Pew's 2014 survey, when 71% of teens used Facebook.

Meta's new plan for Facebook — and winning over younger people — revolves around two prongs:

First, more discovery in the feed. This basically means more recommended content like Reels and other posts in the feed instead of posts from friends and family — sort of like how the Instagram feed has lately been more about the discovery of people you don't follow. That's a big reversal from the 2018 change to Facebook's news feed that prioritized posts from your friends and family over publisher content.

Secondly, Facebook is hoping to lure back young adults with offerings like Marketplace, Dating, Groups, and Events.

Note that Facebook is looking for "young adults" rather than teens — this may be partly because Meta is anxious about promoting its products too directly to teenagers when the company is facing serious scrutiny and lawsuits about its apps' effects on teen mental health. It might not be a great look to be courting a teen audience at the moment.

But Facebook also has more to offer "young adults" than teens. In rolling out the latest changes, Facebook gives the example of a recent college grad, maybe 22, who has just moved to a new city. They need to furnish their apartment on the cheap — so they use Marketplace to get a used couch. That person might find fun things to do through Events and join some local Groups. They might also use Facebook Dating. And maybe they hang out on the app and watch some entertaining Reels in their feed, too. (Video accounts for about 60% of time spent on Facebook, according to Meta.)

Don't laugh — I think this actually might work. The real secret power here is Marketplace, the swap meet-like service that's incredibly useful for lots of people. I know several people who reluctantly joined Facebook just to be able to use Marketplace. I use Marketplace all the time.

Some of Facebook's plan does sound a little overly positive. I'm sure Meta would prefer us all to think of Groups as a nice place to find tips about houseplants rather than remembering Groups like Stop the Steal. And I don't think Facebook Dating is a huge hit. (Meta says Dating numbers are up 20% year-over-year but doesn't say how many people are using it.)

And there's another thing really going for Facebook that I won't be surprised if young adults, joining for the first time, are pleasantly surprised by: The site works pretty well. That sounds like a really low bar, but consider what it's competing with: Craiglist, Evite, Reddit. Not exactly the most user-friendly sites. What a 22-year-old who finally joins Facebook might discover is something of an "everything app" (much to Elon Musk's dismay, I'm sure).

Maybe it's not so much a social network anymore; it's a place to accomplish basic tasks and watch some video. It might not keep you glued to the app for hours when you're trying to go to sleep like TikTok does, but growing a younger demographic by offering utility is a good long-term strategy.

Not long ago, Instagram seemed against the ropes, mired in millennial avocado toast cringe. But it managed to get its mojo back and compete against TikTok, even with teens. Mark Zuckerberg has even managed to turn his reputation largely by wearing some new clothes. I know it seems improbable that Facebook could become cool for Gen Z, but don't count it out — they just might pull this off.

• A Wisconsin woman made $250,000 in 2021 secretly working two jobs. 
• The extra money allowed her husband to take a career break and significantly boosted their savings. 
• She shared why she ultimately gave up "overemployment" after 18 months. 

In 2020, Lisa was making roughly $110,000 working remotely in a corporate manufacturing role, but she wasn't satisfied with her pay.

Lisa, who's in her 40s and based in Wisconsin, landed a job offer for a hybrid role in the same industry that paid nearly $150,000 a year, she told Business Insider via email. But she had been hoping for more money.

Then her husband had an idea: What if she tried to juggle both jobs at the same time?

For 18 months between 2020 and the end of 2021, Lisa secretly worked one fully remote job and a second hybrid job. In 2021, she made roughly $250,000 across her two full-time roles, according to documents viewed by Business Insider.

Lisa said the extra income provided a huge boost to her family's finances. She and her husband are now confident they'll be able to pay for their three children's college educations and various extracurriculars, in addition to future family vacations. Working two jobs also made it possible for her husband to take a much-needed break from the workforce and focus on caring for their children.

"Working the two jobs gave us the freedom to let my husband finally leave his job which was so stressful we feared it was literally taking years from his life," said Lisa, whose identity is known to BI — she asked to use a pseudonym because of his fear of professional repercussions. "It's given us a financial cushion that would have been impossible otherwise."

Lisa is among the Americans secretly juggling multiple jobs to increase their incomes. Business Insider has interviewed roughly 20 "overemployed" people, many of whom are in the IT and tech industries, who've used the extra money to pay off debt, save for retirement, and afford expensive vacations and weight-loss drugs. While some companies may be OK with their workers having a second gig, doing so without approval could have negative repercussions.

As a woman, Lisa is fairly unique in the overemployed community, because most of the job jugglers BI has interviewed are men. In part, this could be because it's less common for women to work in IT and tech. Some workers have told BI that the prevalence of remote roles in these fields — and the flexibility these gigs can offer — make them well suited to overemployment.

It's also possible that some women — many of whom still handle the majority of household and childcare responsibilities — don't have time to pursue a second job. In Lisa's case, her husband's break from the workforce for a couple of months made it easier for her to juggle both roles.

Lisa shared how she managed to balance both jobs and why she ultimately decided to give up her overemployment.

A looming return-to-office mandate made overemployment seem unsustainable

Lisa said having her husband home when he wasn't working was a "huge bonus," particularly since their children did remote schooling for the entire 2020-21 school year due to the pandemic. He was able to slowly return to the workforce, doing part-time work before accepting full-time employment.

Having essentially three full-time incomes for over a year is what truly transformed the family's finances, Lisa said.

When she worked from home, Lisa didn't have too much trouble juggling both jobs — she said she worked roughly 40 to 50 hours a week across the two roles.

On the days she had to go into the office for her hybrid role, she said brought both of her work laptops, which conveniently looked identical. She generally worked from an office cubical, but when she pivoted to her second job, she would go to a private room.

"There were moments when I thought I'd fail but I got positive reviews from both jobs while I was there," she said.

Lisa said she didn't feel guilty about keeping her jobs a secret from her employers, in part because she thinks many companies are greedy — and prioritize profits over workers.

"I felt like I was sticking it to the man when I could," she said.

But near the end of 2021, Lisa started to question how much longer she'd be able to keep this up. When pandemic conditions eased, she thought her fully remote employer would pivot to a hybrid work schedule — and managing two hybrid jobs seemed impossible.

So she decided to try to get ahead of things.

Lisa said she was able to secure a job offer for a role that paid about $175,000 a year and required in-person work. The job paid less than the roughly $250,000 she was making across her two jobs, but it was more than either of them paid individually. In early 2022, she decided to take the job — and said goodbye to her two roles.

"It was a good career move at a time when I thought that remote work was going to disappear," she said.

While some companies have called workers back to the office, others have continued with fully remote working arrangements. In April, about 22% of full-time US workers aged 16 and older worked from home at least some of the time — 10% did so all of the time — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While some overemployed workers have been forced to adjust their plans due to return-to-office mandates, others are still chugging along.

Lisa said she'd consider job juggling again if she could find two fully remote jobs that checked most of her boxes. Among her biggest concerns would be burnout.

"Doing two jobs that need me 100% sounds tremendously stressful, and I would much rather do a job that values all of me and pays me as such," she said.

Are you working multiple remote jobs at the same time and willing to provide details about your pay and schedule? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com.

• The roads are perilous for NYC's app-based delivery drivers on e-bikes and other micro-mobility vehicles.
• NYC infrastructure lags, with few protected bike lanes or designated moped and e-bike lanes.
• Advocates say both the city government and the food delivery companies are to blame.

If you've ordered takeout recently in New York City, chances are your food was whisked to your front door by a delivery driver on an electric bicycle or moped.

But what you likely didn't consider when you made your order was that the person hand-delivering your dinner may have risked their life to get it to you.

New York City delivery workers who don't use cars have one of the deadliest jobs in the city. There are now more than 65,000 app-based restaurant delivery workers in the city, and about 80% of them use e-bikes and motorbikes.

The fatality rate for these workers was at least 36 per 100,000 between January 2021 and June 2022, the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection reported. That's more than 5 times the fatality rate for construction workers in New York City, which was seven per 100,000 in 2020, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most driver deaths are a result of traffic crashes, though workers are also subject to a high rate of violent robbery.

App-based delivery drivers are also being severely injured at extremely high rates. The city report found that 28.7% of e-bike or moped delivery workers experienced injuries that forced them to miss work, lose consciousness, or seek medical care. Complicating matters, delivery drivers are disproportionately immigrants, and many are living in the country illegally, so they avoid reporting these crimes to the police or seeking medical care for fear of deportation.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, transportation and material-moving jobs have the second-highest fatality rates nationwide after farming, fishing, and forestry.

Inadequate infrastructure

The increase in bicycles and electric-powered non-car vehicles on the streets is a huge win for the climate and for street safety in general — more efficient, greener transportation and fewer cars and delivery trucks on the roads is a good thing.

But New York City's infrastructure is way behind. The roads are designed to move cars and trucks as quickly as possible, with little accountability for dangerous driving and very little protected space for anyone getting around by bike or scooter. Just 3% of the city's roads have protected bike lanes, and just 1% of intersections have red light cameras, Bloomberg recently reported.

Delivery drivers aren't the only New Yorkers at high risk of being killed in a traffic accident. Bicycle deaths, overall, hit a 24-year high in 2023. Most of the 30 cyclists who were killed in crashes last year died in collisions with automobiles — mostly trucks or SUVs — on streets without bike lanes, according to a New York Times analysis.

Without sufficient safe infrastructure, cyclists — and all kinds of non-car drivers — opt for sidewalks, where they can disrupt pedestrians, or dangerous roads where they're no match for cars and trucks.

The surge in delivery drivers on e-bikes, scooters, mopeds, and motorbikes has created some safety and quality-of-life issues for everyone else on the street as well.

In January, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced the creation of a new department of sustainable delivery tasked with regulating commercial delivery services that use bikes and other micro-mobility vehicles.

The city's Department of Transportation insists it's taking seriously street safety for delivery workers and others using multi-modal transportation. A spokesperson for the department told Business Insider that it built more protected bike lanes last year — 32 miles of them —  than all other major US cities combined.

But that falls far short of the 50 miles of protected lanes it aimed to build last year. The department also noted it's working to expand certain well-used bike lanes and the number of bus-mounted cameras that ticket drivers that block bike and bus lanes.

Advocates for safer streets say the city needs to do much more to build better infrastructure. They're asking for wider protected bike lanes, or even separate lanes for e-bikes and mopeds, and charging facilities for e-bikes.

"The City is going backwards on street safety. The number of fatalities and injuries will only continue to rise unless the City matches the huge surge in e-bikes and mopeds with infrastructure improvements, dedicated e-bike lanes, investments in slow and shared streets, and accountability from food delivery companies," New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said in a statement to Business Insider.

Little accountability

App-based delivery workers' status as gig workers — contractors rather than employees — is central to their plight. Food delivery companies — including giants like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash — don't have to provide them with benefits, including health insurance.

And they didn't have to provide them with minimum pay until last year when the city implemented a minimum wage for app-based restaurant delivery drivers. In April, the mayor announced the hourly wage would be bumped to $19.56 per hour, before tips — a big improvement on the average of $5.39 per hour that workers made before the law went into effect.

Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the worker advocacy group the Workers Justice Project, blames food delivery companies for creating unsafe working conditions by incentivizing workers to deliver as many orders as they can as quickly as possible, and to work late at night, during storms, and in other risky conditions. Advocates for delivery workers hope minimum pay will lessen these incentives.

"The number one reason we have been advocating for fair pay in the app delivery industry is because having dignified pay actually translates into safety on the streets," Guallpa, who was a driving force behind the creation of minimum pay for app workers, told Business Insider. "Minimum pay really means that you can actually drive safely when you're riding to make that delivery."

A spokesperson for DoorDash said the company offers all drivers occupational accident insurance, and has a trust and safety team available to support drivers around the clock. Uber similarly insisted the company is "deeply committed to building innovative features, promoting safe behavior on the road, and working with safety experts to raise the bar on safety," according to a spokesperson.

Guallpa's group wants to see a slew of other changes to improve worker safety, including boosting worker protections and investments in infrastructure like bike lanes and bike parking, better education for workers and connections to city resources, and stronger enforcement of the employers' obligations.

Lander and Guallpa also want the companies to help their joint effort to create "Deliverista hubs" — storefronts and converted newsstands where workers can take breaks, charge their bikes, get training, and be connected with city resources like health insurance. Three hubs are in the works — one near City Hall in lower Manhattan, one on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Guallpa said.

Keeping delivery workers safe should be a public priority, Guallpa said. Indeed, "New Yorkers are dependent on app delivery workers to keep them safe and fed during times of crisis," she added.

Are you a delivery driver who uses an e-bike or moped? If you're interested in sharing your story, reach out to this reporter at erelman@businessinsider.com.

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is projected to win a third term as the country's leader.
• The multiparty alliance, led by his Bharatiya Janata Party, is expected to win a smaller majority.
• It's the result of a six-week election that saw a bitter feud emerge between the BJP and its rivals.

Narendra Modi is on track to secure a historic third term as India's prime minister, but with a narrower victory than had been expected.

A coalition led by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to win around 300 seats in the Indian parliament, which is lower than the 400 seats it was expected to win in some exit polls, Reuters reported early Tuesday.

The opposition INDIA alliance, led by the centrist Congress party, is expected to make gains and is projected to win around 220 seats, the report said. In the Indian parliament, a party or coalition that wins 272 seats can form the government.

The final votes were cast on Saturday in the seventh phase of the election, which saw people in eight of India's 36 states and territories take their turns at the ballot.

Modi had expected a landslide

Modi and the BJP had long been projected to win decisively. Exit polls, though sometimes inconsistent, showed the party extending its control of the lower house.

Modi had set a goal for his BJP-led alliance to secure 400 seats, up from about 350 won in 2019.

The incumbent was so assured of being reelected this year that he declared victory on social media three days before the official results were scheduled to be announced on Tuesday.

"I can say with confidence that the people of India have voted in record numbers to reelect the NDA government," he wrote on X.

A bitter battle for power

The weekslong election involved a bitter feud between the BJP and its main opposition, the Congress Party.

The Congress Party has formed its own bloc with about 20 opposition groups to oust Modi, campaigning on promises to relieve the nation's unemployment woes. However, the new alliance is undermined by differences in ideologies and contested leadership.

Modi, a polarizing but popular leader, has spent much of the election blasting the Congress and its promised policies in controversial attacks. At one point, he accused the opposition of planning to take India's wealth and redistribute it to the Muslim minority.

While not specifically criticizing Muslims in his rally speeches, he has used terms such as "infiltrators" that are widely believed to allude to the minority.

His party's ideology, Hindutva, promotes building a Hindu nation and has been criticized as a nationalist movement that foments hate speech and right-wing extremism.

BJP's rivals have also accused the party of attempting to stifle opposition leaders. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, of the Aam Aadmi Party, was recently arrested on corruption charges in handing out liquor licenses. Kejriwal was granted bail until the end of the election.

India's voting population is the world's largest, with 969 million people eligible to cast their ballots. That's more than twice the entire population of the European Union.

They're building data centers pretty much everywhere these days. The sprawling, windowless buildings are the physical engines of the internet and the cloud; more are now under construction than ever before, and the new breed is bigger and hungrier. A typical center used to consume 10 megawatts of electricity; now they're being built to suck up 10 times that much. Last year all the data centers in the world had room for 10.1 zettabytes of information — roughly 456 billion Wikipedias. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, which requires vast quantities of data and power, the global capacity of data centers is expected to double by 2027. If you don't live near a data center, you will soon.

But cloud computing and AI aren't the only things driving the push for "hyperscaled" data centers. About 65% of the capacity in global centers is owned by just three companies: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Like the railroad magnates of old, they're racing to control the market, because they understand something that has eluded the rest of us. Data centers are more than just vast digital warehouses. They're the essential infrastructural technology on which pretty much every other company in the world must run. 

When companies need pretty much any computing service these days — networking, security, data processing, platforms, you name it — it's easier and cheaper to just rent it from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. The more data centers those companies have, the more of those services they can offer, and the more storage and number-crunching capacity they can provide. By trying to corner the market on data centers, they're not just creating bigger warehouses for data — they're aiming to be a one-stop shop for all of the tech a company needs.

That's even more true of AI startups. When an innovative newcomer needs access to the large language models that are required to train and run generative AI, they pretty much have to go through Big Tech to get them. And now the tech giants are making venture investments in those startups by offering them "credits" for using the company's cloud. That's how Microsoft made a chunk of its investment in OpenAI, for example — by giving the startup access to its data centers. It's a lucrative inducement to join a proprietary ecosystem.

"This is where the real business is," says Cecilia Rikap, an economist who is the author of a new report called "Dynamics of Corporate Governance Beyond Ownership in AI." "The more AI is consumed, there's more cloud consumption, and therefore not only more money for these companies but more digital technology that is intertwined and tangled inside their infrastructure."

And that entanglement is what worries many economists and legal scholars. Regulators call the problem "locking in." Changing from one data ecosystem to another isn't like moving your office to a new building; the programming interfaces between Microsoft Azure, say, don't just port over to Amazon Web Services. Getting into one is easy, but like the Hotel California, you can never leave. Once a tech giant gives a startup access to its cloud services and its large language models, it has pretty much assured itself a form of control over a fledgling firm that might one day have grown into a competitor. "Market leaders benefit from early-mover advantage coupled with network effects and high switching costs that lock-in customers," a congressional subcommittee warned in a 450-page report back in 2020. The rush to build data centers is, in no small part, a move by Big Tech to secure the keys to the coming AI kingdom.

In the short term, the rise of data centers has actually been a good thing for startups. "Until recently, the perception among academics was that the rise of cloud computing was great for startups and innovation," says Matthew Wansley, a law professor at Yeshiva University who studies competition and regulation. "It used to be that if you were a startup, you had to build your own servers. That's a huge, fixed up-front cost."

That's not true anymore. The price of cloud-computing services has fallen every year since 2006, when Amazon opened its cloud. And it absolutely crashed in 2014, as a team of economists noted, when Microsoft and Google started advertising their competitive prices. From 2010 to 2014, AWS database prices dropped by 11%. Over the next two years, they plunged by 22%.

Cloud computing also made it easier for startups to get funding. Venture capitalists adopted a "spray and pray" approach to investing, meaning they placed bets on more companies but put less money into each one. They also ratcheted back their direct involvement in running the companies, trusting the marketplace to sort out the winners from the losers.

The whole scene has been especially great for AI startups. "Smaller companies like us could get access to compute power and the scalability that the larger service providers offer," says Jonas Jacobi, CEO and cofounder of ValidMind, a fintech company. "You have a few large players dominating the AI space, but there are startups trying to compete with them as well. The only reason they can is because of the cloud vendors."

The trick, Jacobi says, is to write code that can work with any of the three providers, so you don't get locked in to a single company. You have to stay "neutral to the tech stack," he says. Sure, one of the tech giants can always swoop in and build their own version of your software. There's data suggesting that Amazon has made it a standard operating procedure to "engulf" the products of small, open-source competitors and repackage them as part of its own suite of services, as it did with the Elastic search engine. "But that's part of the journey as a startup," Jacobi says. "It's just up to us as a company to be faster and nimbler."

But over time, economists warn, nimble won't be enough. In the battle to create foundational tech — the "key complementary assets" of the business — AI startups will inevitably lose out to the tech giants that control the data centers. "AI is a general-purpose technology," says Rikap. "It's being applied to everything. But what type of AI we get and what type we don't get is going to be affected by the power of just three companies. It's an intellectual monopoly. What they are controlling is data and knowledge." By locking startups into their systems, Google and Amazon and Microsoft can effectively play favorites, offering better deals and cheaper services to the companies in which they have the largest stake. 

Over time, economists warn, AI startups will inevitably lose out to the tech giants that control the data centers.

Rikap has also found that their growing control of data centers also gives Big Tech an incentive to work together to share information and protect their joint interests. In a paper with Bengt-Åke Lundvall, an economist at Aalborg University in Denmark, Rikap notes that articles in technical and academic journals from researchers at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon consistently had coauthors employed by their competitors. Now, for sure, computer science is a small world. But the joint authorship, Rikap says, is "a pure way to tell they are collaborating and know what each other are doing" — a hallmark of anticompetitive behavior.

For the moment, there is still reason to hope that innovation can win out over monopolization. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are still competing on price and features, which is good for everyone. And in Europe, where regulators are taking a more aggressive approach to tech generally and cloud computing in particular, the Big Three are busy pointing fingers at one another. A Google Cloud exec recently denounced Microsoft as a "monopoly" and a "walled garden," and a trade group that includes Amazon filed an antitrust complaint over Microsoft's cloud-computing licenses. As they vie for market share, the companies aren't in lockstep yet — and that creates an opening, albeit a small one, for nimble, faster competitors.

There's also a tendency, over time, for mature technology companies to shift from trying to innovate themselves to simply charging other people who innovate. Among economists, that's known as "rent-seeking behavior," and it looks an awful lot like what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are doing with cloud computing and data centers.

So what's the best way to make sure Big Tech doesn't use data centers to short-circuit innovation? Researchers point to Google, which is offering a friendlier kind of partnership to startups. "The Google Cloud Division partners with promising database start-ups, contributes to open-source projects, and collaborates with open-source foundations," two scholars recently observed. It's an "architecture of participation," they say, that enables Google to profit while fostering the growth of new companies and ideas.

Even more important, the Federal Trade Commission, aware of the threat posed by data centers, has ordered the Big Tech companies to hand over information on their AI investments. Just as new laws eventually caught up to the pricing practices of the railroads in the 1880s, today's regulators may well catch up to the futuristic, technological tangles of cloud computing. One reason to think so: The lead author of that 450-page House subcommittee report about Big Tech's anticompetitive behavior was a lawyer named Lina Khan. Today's she's the hard-charging head of the FTC.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.