No company stores more data than Amazon, the former online bookseller. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has become the richest man in the world. Every second Euro in online trading is spent at Amazon. Is the IT giant, with its unabated growth, about to turn our economic system upside down?

Amazon is a machine that can simultaneously observe, compare and analyze more than 300 million people worldwide. The company is not just a marketplace, market supervisor and provider of more and more services and consumer items - it also controls all the data streams in this market and uses them to its own benefit. Who suspects that a single click on an Amazon page will forward information to the company that fills a printed DIN-A-4 page? A conversation with Alexa, watching a streaming offer on Amazon-Prime, ordering vegetables via Amazon-Fresh - all this put together creates a whole library of information about every customer. The group collects everything - it just won’t reveal what conclusions it draws from it. What would be possible if data from other, new business areas were added? In the USA, Amazon is also active in the health and insurance sectors, and police officers are using its facial recognition software to search for wanted persons.

Mega-corporations like Amazon and Facebook are becoming more powerful. And their growth shows no signs of slowing down. They are in the public eye -- but are they also above the law?

The pandemic has only made the "big four” -- Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook -- more influential. Our data has become big business. But are these corporations out of control?

Experts have long watched as corporations like Apple and Amazon flout antitrust laws, while receiving special treatment: When it comes to wages, taxes and laws, these corporations seem to rewrite the rules as they go. Many critics consider Facebook and Google’s systematic data exploitation a violation of our core democratic principals. Moreover, the line between the state and mega-corporations is growing even foggier. Some states believe there is simply no way around these giants. Corporate power seems like it is here to stay.

Market driven surveillance undermines our sovereignty and thus the very foundation of Western democracies. There is a storm brewing both in the U.S. and Europe. But the corporations are ready for it. Will they continue on this dangerous trajectory, or is there some chance we can still rein them in?