committee shared a now infamous picture of the empty seat and nameplate, stating: “Nine countries. 24 official representatives. 447 million people represented. One question: where is Mark Zuckerberg?” Not much they could do about it!
In 2021, tech-state companies acted unilaterally and censored the president of the United States and many of his influential followers. Hate him or love him and what he stands for, he was still the president of the most powerful country in the world. Think about that.
Of course, incitement to violence is a criminal offense in all liberal democracies around the world. There is an obvious reason for this: violence is harmful. It harms those who are immediately targeted. Five people died in the riots of January 6, 2021, in Washington DC. “A police officer was beaten, a rioter was shot, and three others died during the rampage” (Healy, 2021). Violence also harms the institutions of democracy themselves, which rely on elections rather than civil wars and on a peaceful transfer of power.
To be fair to the tech-state, there is no doubt the former president was given considerable leeway in his public commentary prior to—and during the course of—his presidency. However, he crossed a line into stoking imminent lawlessness and violence. Thus, many could argue that he brought it on himself. We all agree that we need to improve social media, but the tougher question is how we tackle misinformation while also valuing freedom of expression.
The point still remains. A single individual at certain companies can censor whomever they want! That's the outsized power I am talking about.
The Exponential Nature of Tech
Nation-states cannot regulate exponential digital technologies (tech-states) using the same processes and tactics used to regulate analog technologies. It simply won't work; the bullet train is moving too fast. Regulations are always going to be trailing, playing catch up. More often than not, they are reactively responding to problems and issues.
New exponential technology companies require new “tricks” for oversight.
The relationship between tech companies and regulations reminds me of a chameleon. The slow speed at which chameleons walk is metaphorically how governments and regulators are approaching regulating tech-state companies. These tech-state companies are like flies, flapping their wings 230 beats per second.
The chameleon has had to adapt its tongue to move as fast as the fly, without moving its entire body in order to keep up. Do yourself a favor and watch a video of a chameleon catching a fly in slow motion. It's impressive! If nation-state regulators are to ever catch up with the big, fast-moving wings of exponential tech, they have to adapt like the chameleon.
What is needed is a fundamental change so that nation-states can regain their power and protect the planet and all of humanity, not just a fortunate few.
Monopoly Power
A monopoly happens when a company and its product offerings dominate a sector or industry. The term “monopoly” is often used to describe an entity that has total or near-total control of a market. Monopolistic companies fend off competition at all costs in what is now known as the “buy or bury” approach. Many tech-state companies, although they would not admit it, are monopolies. If any meaningful competition bubbles to the surface, their first efforts are to try to buy them. If the founders are stubborn and say no, tech-state companies often build a copycat version of that product, squeeze the air out of the tiny startup, and bury it before it has a chance to respond.
Facebook, for example, has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition in an effort to maintain its market dominance in the social networking industry. The U.S. federal government and 48 states made a move to file lawsuits against Facebook, accusing it of anti-competitive conduct by abusing its market power to create a monopoly and crushing smaller competitors (Business Standard, 2020). In the late 1990s, Microsoft also lost a lawsuit to the U.S. government when the judge ruled that Microsoft had actively tried to crush its competitors, including Apple, IBM, Netscape, Sun, and others (Blumenthal and Wu, 2018). Facebook is taking a page from the Microsoft playbook.
Facebook and many tech giants like it employ unique data-gathering tools to monitor hot new apps in an effort to see what is gaining traction with users. That data helps Facebook and others select acquisition targets that pose the greatest threats to their market dominance. Once selected, they offer the heads of these companies vast amounts of money, which greatly inflates the values of the apps, all in hopes of avoiding any competition in the future.
Facebook and Zuckerberg saw Instagram as a direct threat quickly after the company launched. After initially trying to build its own version of Instagram (which gained no traction), in 2012 Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook was “very behind” Instagram and a better strategy would be “to consider paying a lot of money” for the photo-sharing app in an effort to “neutralize a potential competitor.” A few months later, in April 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, despite the fact that the company did not have a single cent of revenue and valued itself at $500 million (Stickings and Griffith, 2020).
In another classic example, the mobile messaging app called WhatsApp posed a unique threat to Facebook's growth, giving users the ability to send messages on their mobile devices, both one-to-one and to groups, for free. In February 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp (Olson, 2014).
You may still be wondering why monopolies are bad. Besides often having more power than the nation-states in which they operate, there are many other negative consequences. For one, if there is one company on the block, it can increase prices whenever and however they like. If a single firm sets the price for an entire industry, prices will always be on the rise. Price discrimination is also common, since there is no transparency and consumers have no viable alternatives.
How to Mitigate the UCOTs of Tech-State Companies
In the short term, while both nation-states and tech-states are under centralized control, many people see an increased need for more government intervention and regulation of these tech-state companies. There are at least four areas related to humanity and the planet that need regulation: safety, privacy, competition, and honesty.
Over the past decade, tech giants have risen to become the most valuable companies in the world, all while operating with little formal, structured government oversight. The tiny patchwork regulatory oversight and industry self-regulation both lack transparency and coherence to affect any meaningful change. Only by coordinating action across all four policy paths will we see any real change. Europe often leads the way and again recently overhauled the digital rules that some experts say could become a global standard for keeping these companies in check (Browne, 2020).
If there is something that's clear, as a society we need to design an alternative system, perhaps a decentralized system of tech-state and nation-state.
We got into this pickle because initially tech was fighting the fact that government was too powerful and was getting into people's businesses and affecting how citizens consume goods.
At first, tech and the free market gave citizens free will and autonomy and spared them from the overbearing power of the government. As we have discussed, that has turned out to be an overcorrection, as the power appears to be flipping from nation-states to tech-states.
An oversized, powerful centralized tech-state has many disadvantages. An oversized, powerful centralized nation-state in the form of a dictatorship or
