The 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, took place in a more innocent age. Donald Trump had not yet assumed control of the White House, and Silicon Valley was still considered a protagonist in the American landscape, beloved of users and lawmakers alike. The year’s theme was “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and the soiree centered on emerging technologies, which seemed to presage an era of unprecedented possibility. “Imagine a robot capable of treating Ebola patients or cleaning up nuclear waste,” researcher Dileep George gushed, while W.E.F. founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab was more pragmatic: “We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments,” he said. “There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril.”

This year, as backlash to Big Tech’s outsize influence reaches a global fever pitch, speakers’ remarks have taken on a more dire tone. On Thursday, billionaire investor George Soros, whose investment fund, as of November, owned several thousand shares of Facebook, offered a full-on dystopian conspiracy theory, indicting both the social network and Alphabet’s Google. According to BuzzFeed News, Soros said that both companies would “compromise themselves” in order to enter the Chinese market. That, he said, could lead to “an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich I.T. monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined.”

He went on to compare Google and Facebook to mining and oil companies, saying that both “earn their profits by exploiting their environment . . . Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social-media companies exploit the social environment.” Soros added that “this is particularly nefarious because social-media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it.” He also voiced concerns about the monopolistic nature of tech companies, warning that it’s “only a matter of time before the global dominance of the U.S. I.T. monopolies is broken . . . Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered.”

Soros is far from the only Davos attendee who has embraced the techlash. Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff said on Tuesday that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company: “[Cigarettes are] addictive, they’re not good for you . . . I think that for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address.” And British Prime Minister Theresa May gave a speech on Thursday that warned of the weaponization of tech companies, and urged them to take responsibility for “harmful and illegal” activity online.

All three speakers agreed that policymakers must boost regulations on Big Tech in order to, as Soros put it, preserve ”competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access.” It’s a suggestion that has grown in popularity in recent weeks as experts rally behind it. And it’s one that, given the prominence of Davos speakers, may just grow legs thanks to their overtures.