An existential threat to democracy
Reading sample These six richest men in the world pose an existential threat to the democracies that have made them great. The United States and Europe have allowed the tech giants to grow and grow - until they became untoucha
Musk and Trump: Two men who could forge a dangerous alliance
Billionaires more powerful than states...
by Christine Kerdellant
[This
reading sample posted on 9/5/2024 is translated from the German on the
Internet,
https://www.freitag.de/produkt-der-woche/buch/milliardaere-die-maechtiger-sind-als-staaten/existentielle-bedrohung-der-demokratie.]
A “systemic” power
There are six of them, all American, and they are active worldwide, beyond the reach of tax collectors and regulators. Their personal wealth is beyond imagination: 50, 100, 150 billion, depending on the mood on the stock markets. They claim to want to save the world, but the Covid pandemic has above all made them even richer. Even if their shares lose value, they still outweigh most countries in the world. What are their names? Elon
Musk (SpaceX, Tesla, X), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook-Meta), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page
(Google). These six have systemic or “systemic” power.
It is not their wealth that makes them so powerful, rather their power makes their wealth. Basically, their obvious financial power is not that important. What matters are capabilities that states do not possess, no longer possess or have never possessed. In some areas, they are replacing or competing with states. One day they will be able to replace them completely without having been chosen by the people. This is something that has never happened before in the history of democracies.
These
six Western billionaires are getting richer and more powerful without
anyone stopping them, because those who could stop them don't want to,
and those who would like to stop them can't. They pose an existential
threat to democracy. They
pose an existential threat to the democracies that made them great,
even though they claim to watch over our lives like the Vatican watches
over our souls.
According to Forbes magazine,
there were 2668 dollar billionaires on the planet in 2023; Musk,
Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, Bezos and Gates are not all the first on this
list. Bernard
Arnault, the head of LVMH (Louis Vuitton-Moët-Hennessy), is often at
the top when the wind is blowing in his favor on the stock market,
Warren Buffet, the 90-year-old king of investors, or Françoise
Bettencourt Meyers, the heiress of L'Oréal, have amassed wealth without,
however, having any power over the life and death of our societies. They
have more money than they could ever spend, but they are not
transhumanists, they do not intend to change the human species, they do
not harbour messianic dreams and they do not use their colossal
resources to abolish death or colonize Mars - and they do not exert the
same destructive influence on the psyche of the younger generations.
It
is six men we are talking about here, and not the “GAFAM” bloc (Google,
Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), but in any case the power of these
tycoons is based on the companies they founded first. However, their own activities are not identical to those of their companies. Furthermore,
Elon Musk's companies are not part of the GAFAM group, even though he
is one of the billionaires with almost unlimited power. Finally,
Apple, which is part of GAFAM, does not have a monopoly, i.e. it does
not have sole power in one area: it has to contend with powerful
competition from Korea and China. So
when Steve Jobs, the iconic founder of Apple, was still alive, he was
not one of this handful of “systemically relevant” billionaires.
The United States and Europe allowed the tech giants to grow and grow until they became untouchable. China,
on the other hand, has reined them in, having prepared the ground for
its own players such as Alibaba or Tencent, but when they became
super-powerful and a threat to the state, Xi Jinping clipped their
wings. He brought them into line so that he alone could benefit from their power. Such a takeover is difficult to imagine in the West, and China is anything but a constitutional state.
Bezos did not have to pay taxes from 2007 to 2011
Have the Western states become too weak or these billionaires too strong?
If their wealth beats all records, it is not only because of their flourishing businesses: It
is also because they have understood how to divert global financial
flows to their advantage - with the help of tax havens and to the
detriment of the countries in which they operate. Some
of them have even evaded US federal income tax on their own assets by
declaring higher losses in their investments than their annual income. This
was the case with Elon Musk in 2008 and with Jeff Bezos between 2007
and 2011 - just before he became the richest man in the world for a
while.
They
could well live in a world without states and are instinctively
suspicious of governments that limit their influence or impose taxes on
them. Elon
Musk supports Trump and his low taxes for the richest; the founders of
Google planned for a while to locate Google offshore, on a platform off
the American coast.
These
new ultra-rich are also taking over some sovereign tasks from the
states, i.e. activities that can actually only be carried out by the
sovereign. They
are active in space travel, healthcare, defense, diplomacy and
education - that is, science and the shaping of the mind - to the point
where they are completely dominant in certain areas. They are richer, more influential and more active than most nation states. And they are not accountable to anyone - especially not to voters. But is it normal for them to decide what is good for citizens instead of them?
When
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet flew to the International Space Station
(ISS) in 2021, he did not do so using a French rocket. Nor did he use a launcher from the once all-powerful NASA, the American space agency. The American government can no longer produce such devices. Since the explosion of the Challenger in 1986, which traumatized the nation, it no longer takes risks. The French astronaut did not use a European rocket either - Europe, which used to be very good at the space business with the Ariane , has fallen behind. Pesquet reached the ISS with a Falcon 9 , a rocket from Elon Musk - Jeff Bezos would have liked it better if it had been his, a Blue Origin. The Amazon founder is therefore seeking revenge. But whether it's one or the other, it's the new billionaires who are sending our space travelers into space.
Elon Musk has taken the risks instead of the American state and has been paid handsomely for it. This
South African, Canadian and US entrepreneur, who is also rich to the
tune of 246 billion dollars, has become a space giant in the space of a
decade. For
him, the short trips to the space station and back are just a greeting
from the kitchen: what interests him are the giant rockets that will
take people to the moon and then to Mars tomorrow. Because he has decided to make the red planet our “spare planet”. A virgin territory, a new Wild West where the boldest rule and dictate the law, because there is no state there. NASA (i.e. the American people) makes his dreams of Mars possible by funding the development of his Starship lunar shuttles.
Elon does not like regulations, no given order. He only believes in talent, speed and willpower. Not just in cars or rockets. He owns a third of the telecommunications satellites orbiting the earth. He launched them into space without asking anyone's permission. His principle: first come, first served. All the worse for Europe if it makes no effort to send up its own. He only knows the law of the jungle. Europe cannot keep up.
Starlink decides the war in Ukraine
Thanks to him, Ukraine can take on the Russian army. He doesn't produce Caesar howitzers or Leopard tanks ... but his satellites are crucial for this war of the 21st century. He
has allowed the Ukrainian armed forces to use them for their digital
combat systems, to use them for observation, to coordinate artillery
attacks and to allow operational units to communicate with staffs. When
drones, cameras, video recordings and enemy observation count as much
as the number of armored divisions, the availability of the Internet is
of vital interest.
If Elon Musk had not provided the Ukrainians with his Starlink system-
those hundreds of satellites that are too numerous to all be switched
off, and the associated stations - the Russians would have destroyed
their Ukrainian “little brother” on the first attempt. Thanks to his network, Kiev was able to wage its war. However,
the billionaire may have cut the connections in certain particularly
contested areas in the south, perhaps at the request of Vladimir Putin,
with whom he maintains contacts. Without internet access, the Ukrainians there were in total chaos just as they were about to go on the attack. Today, Pentagon officials tremble at the idea that Musk might withdraw from Ukraine.
In
order to prevent Russia from annexing the country, Volodymyr Zelensky's
army was also able to draw on technologies from Google, Microsoft,
Amazon and Meta, which no state could have provided. The myth of the Internet giants' political neutrality soon became untenable. The Ukrainian government was informed of the first cyberattacks because Microsoft had alerted the White House. Since then, the Microsoft and Amazon clouds have been home to the Ukrainian population register and the country's tax records. Google plays a central role in geolocation, while YouTube and Facebook are used to combat disinformation. The companies of the six billionaires have established themselves in Ukraine's civilian and military electronics.
What does this mean? All data on citizens is freely accessible to Big Tech. In order to be able to fulfill the most urgent tasks, Ukrainians are giving up their sovereignty ...
The digital giants have gained an importance in the Ukraine conflict that raises political questions. They operate transparently vis-à-vis the American government agencies. If
we believe General Bonnemaison, the commander of the French ComCyber,
who was heard in the National Assembly in December 2022, what an allied
power could muster is not comparable to the resources that the
billionaires have at their disposal - in terms of technicians, material,
investment volume or research capacity. Of
course, the ground, sea and air are controlled by national armies, but
cyberspace, like space, is largely dominated by private companies. So
the private sector plays a vital role in a country's defense - and
whether you like it or not, it sets some of the rules of the game.
Musk decides on “good” and “evil”
The same Elon Musk, master of space travel and electric cars, bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars and renamed it X. In doing so, he has laid his hands on a gigantic influencer network with 350 million users. On
this new terrain, he has first of all eliminated the “censorship” of
which Donald Trump and Kanye West had become “victims” after having been
at home there for a long time. The
former president tweeted his fake information there and endangered
democracy when he called on his supporters to storm the Capitol. And the rapper provoked people there non-stop and spouted anti-Semitic slogans. Trump, who has his own social media channel, only returned to what had become X on August 24, 2023, with his mug shot, the police photo that established his identity to the courts. Meanwhile, Kanye West tweeted again, and Musk had to censor him again: The rapper couldn't restrain himself from whitewashing the Nazis and expressing his admiration for Hitler. However, this censorship, as well as what was allowed to happen, raises a question: Of course you can't defend Kanye West, but is it normal that Musk could decide the matter all by himself? Shortly after he bought the network, he had blocked the accounts of a dozen journalists, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, whose fault was that they had revealed the location of his private jet, in other words violated his privacy. So can Elon Musk decree for the entire planet what is “good” and what is “bad”? Like Marc Zuckerberg, who decided on his own to block Donald Trump's Facebook account? But who can decide good and evil if not God, for those who believe in him? Or an assembly of judges as representatives of the citizens?
This
is not the first time that the White House has had to deal with
businessmen who dominate key sectors of the economy, such as the
railroads, the oil industry or the telecommunications sector. But the difference between our billionaires and the robber barons
of the 19th century is that Musk and Zuckerberg have a technology and a
medium at their disposal that, if they so choose, can become their own
network and their own broadcast chain from which they can directly
disseminate their political ideas.
Does
Musk consider himself the creator when he has implants inserted into
the brains of monkeys or pigs - and certainly soon also human volunteers
(this has already happened in 2024, translator's note) - to advance the
hybridization of man and machine so that humanity can “keep up” with
artificial intelligence?
This strange and extravagant patron is not the only one of his kind. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been trying to do business with NASA like him with his Blue Origin rocket
ever since the USA had to entrust the fate of its astronauts to these
billionaires, for whom the world has long been far too small. He
too is trying to promote space tourism by means of contracts with
public institutions, only too happy that the United States has abandoned
its own initiatives in the face of the technical challenges - to the
point where it is no longer afraid to ask the Russians from Soyuz for help. NASA
is entrusting even the spacesuits of the astronauts who will next walk
on the moon to private industry; they will, it is said, be worth more
than 1 billion dollars apiece: Washington will therefore not have them designed, but will rent them!
Bezos already sees us in O'Neill colonies
The biggest internet retailer also has a big plan for humanity: the O'Neill project. Jeff
Bezos dreams of resettling the population of our exhausted planet in
“O'Neill cylinders”, named after the American physicist Gerard K.
O'Neill. These are huge cylinders or capsules several kilometers long that float in space and could contain cities and fields.
For
the near future, the Amazon founder has started to try his hand at one
of the fields in which the American state is only weakly represented:
healthcare. This
is an area of rapidly increasing importance, and the web billionaires
have so much user data that they feel they have to exploit this gold
mine. It's
easy to guess that those who know the habits of their customers - their
diets, their lifestyles, whether they exercise or not, even the doctors
they go to - can easily distinguish the good policyholders from the
less good ones and will one day be able to make them pay accordingly. He can also sell the data to insurers, banks and employers. Bezos tried it with Amazon Care, but had to pull out in 2022 due to a lack of profitability. But only for the time being.
Jeff
Bezos is not the only billionaire who has his eye on people's health,
assuming he can handle it better than states or public institutions: Bill
Gates, the founder and developer of Microsoft, has decided to use his
“retirement” and his fortune on a global scale for philanthropic
purposes, in the grand tradition of American billionaires, but with
multiplied efforts.
Bill Gates is part of global healthcare. The
Microsoft founder has a seat at the WHO, the World Health Organization,
where he is the second largest donor with 751 million dollars a year,
far ahead of Germany, France or China. When
President Trump decided at the time that the USA would withdraw from
the WHO and no longer pay into it, the world's most powerful pensioner
suggested that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation could take over
its payments. He
is now indispensable in the fight against polio and malaria in Africa
and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research and equitable
distribution of a vaccine against Covid-19.
Bill Gates rules over world health
Gates
applies the same rigorous methods to vaccination campaigns that have
guaranteed his success in computer science for five decades. He decides which vaccine
He
decides which vaccine is most urgently needed and which children in
which country should be vaccinated under which conditions. The states submit to this regime, they have no other choice. After
all, it is his money, that of the foundation he set up with his wife
Melinda, from whom he is now separated, but who continued to be their
ambassador alongside him. (Melinda Gates retired from the foundation in 2024 to devote herself to her own charitable projects, translator's note) What
Gates achieves is truly extraordinary - but there are those who accuse
him of making decisions alone, without any counterbalance. It
is true that he is not accountable to anyone and that no one knows his
selection criteria, the principles according to which he operates in one
country or another. There is no democratic control over his philanthropic commitment. He is criticized for the influence he now has over the WHO. For some, he has effectively become its boss.
Bill
Gates has always been treated badly on the net, perhaps because of
memories of the time when Microsoft still had a monopoly and stood up to
its competitor Apple like Goliath against David. Today, conspiracy theorists accuse him of knowing that the Covid-19 pandemic would break out. He
had in fact warned the authorities worldwide that the danger was
imminent - and therefore, according to the conspiracy theorists, he must
have brought it on himself.
Sergey
Brin and Larry Page, the inventors of Google, on the other hand, do not
want to limit themselves to vaccinations: they want to make people
immortal. Never before has a head of state had such an ambition. They would like to do better than God, even against his “will”. These two libertarians have invested part of their fortune in this ultimate goal: to abolish ageing and death. The
biotech company Calico (California Life Company), which is based on
Veteran's Boulevard (a better name could not have been invented) in San
Francisco, is dedicated to this challenge.
They could also put their money into cancer research, but that doesn't interest them. That wouldn't be ambitious enough for them, because it wouldn't add more than three years to people's life expectancy. What they want is to “kill death”. So Calico is researching the process of ageing. The
vice president of Alphabet's most secretive company (which includes
Google) is Cynthia Kenyon, a researcher who made a name for herself in
1993 by succeeding in doubling the lifespan of a worm, C. elegans, through genetic manipulation. Calico also works with naked mole rats, a rodent species that lives longer than others.
Larry
Page and Sergey Brin have also funded the transhumanist “Singularity
University” and recruited its director Ray Kurzweil, a genius of neural
networks, to lead the research at Google. Kurzweil
is convinced that our species must go beyond its biological limits and
merge with machines in order to achieve immortality: If we can transfer the contents of the brain to a robot, we won't need our makeshift bodies at all! Page and Brin didn't consult with anyone and didn't bother to set up an ethics committee before launching these programs.
Only the richest will be immortal
Unlike
states that consult with groups of “wise men” and organize a democratic
discussion before making decisions that could affect future generations
and change the human species, the tech billionaires believe that
whatever is possible should be done and that what is good for them is
good for us. Death is a problem, and for every problem there is a solution. Regardless
of the ethical issues involved, it would be naïve to believe that the
elixir of eternal youth, if they can find it, would be universally
accessible. As always, only the rich will be able to afford it. The
founders of Google are also members of the very closed club of leading
international artificial intelligence companies, having bought DeepMind,
the British champion in this field. They also owned their own AI research division, GoogleBrain. They
merged the two, no doubt to have the strongest position in the race
towards General Artificial Intelligence, an intelligence that would be
at least as intelligent as humans.
Mark Zuckerberg is the last of these billionaires who are more powerful than entire states - and not the least influential. The
head of Facebook and Instagram has information about 3 billion people, a
third of the inhabitants of our planet, and the more affluent third at
that. And he knows how to influence these people. No dictatorship in the world could do this on this scale. In the Cambridge Analytica affair, it turned out that he exploited this valuable knowledge without any scruples. Facebook
actually handed over the profiles of its subscribers to an organization
that was able to control their votes through targeted messages.
Whistleblower
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, has also shown that the
company “financed its profits with our security”. Indeed,
in early November 2020, a few days after Joe Biden's victory over
Donald Trump in the presidential election campaign, a Facebook data
analyst let his colleagues know that 10% of the political content
streamed on the platform were messages saying the election had been
rigged. This
rumor, spread on Facebook and then repeated ad nauseam by Donald Trump,
led to the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Supporters of the former president invaded Congress when Joe Biden's victory was to be confirmed and five people were killed.
The
founder of Facebook and the founders of Google have another enormous
power: they determine the life and death of the media and thus of
democracy. Their
two companies alone reap two thirds of the advertising revenue on the
internet, to the detriment of the media, which nevertheless provide the
content. They have refused to pay for the distribution of their articles, contrary to what European law prescribes. In doing so, they disregard the sovereignty of states and violate democratic principles. In some countries, this is still being fought over today. But
although the imperialist strategy of these men threatens the balance of
political power, the states realized too late that they had
underestimated their destructive power.
How did these overpowering entrepreneurs rise above the leaders and owners of traditional entrepreneurs? How have they been able to change our lives, for the better and more often for the worse? Is it because they have “dreams”, very big plans, the will to recreate the world according to their will? The bosses of Procter & Gamble, Volkswagen or Vuitton don't boast about taking people's lives to a new level. Our “supermen”, however, have dedicated themselves to this almost messianic task. They see themselves as the saviors of the world.
Young people in great danger
And yet! They didn't save them during the Covid pandemic. Apart
from Bill Gates - who has made this his mission in his second life -
they have done nothing to finance or distribute vaccines. They have been content to make money. Because
in the face of forced lockdowns, the internet became indispensable for
communicating, shopping, watching movies, working from home or business
trips in the form of video conferencing ... They
can only thank this strange flu that they have done nothing to fight:
it has allowed tech companies to achieve a level of penetration of the
economy in a few months that would normally have taken them 20 years. Amazon sales, online medical care and online conferencing on Google Meet or its equivalents Zoom or Teams have exploded. The tech giants have done us a service, it is true, but above all they have enriched themselves by billions. The profits of Amazon and Facebook simply doubled in the second third of 2020 compared to the previous year.
Not only are these companies not making the world “better”; on the contrary, they are changing it by jeopardizing democracy. Social networks from Facebook to X are largely responsible for the rise of political aggression and populism. Their
algorithms encourage the spread of increasingly strong convictions or
provocative views, leaving individual user communities in an unhealthy
ideological isolation. With
these machines driving social division, political polarization is
wreaking havoc on the public sphere in both the US and Europe.
Perhaps
even worse, social media is having a pernicious effect on the mental
health of children and adolescents, who spend too many hours a day in
front of screens, stunting their intellectual development. As
we will see, it is no coincidence that most tech company bosses ban
their children from owning a smartphone before they are 14 and limit the
amount of time their teenage children are allowed to spend on the web. They also often assign them to schools where no screen devices are allowed.
Facebook
and its ilk have commissioned studies and research from psychologists;
they know better than anyone that high-dose use of social media in young
people results in a loss of enjoyment of life, triggers depression and
can even lead to suicide. They
also know that “beauty filters” used to enhance photos on Instagram are
exploding the number of plastic surgeries among 18- to 30-year-olds who
dream of looking like their retouched image. They
are catering for a generation of frustrated and mentally unstable
adults - and are doing so deliberately to increase their profits. Today's
generation of young people, who are the victims of this, are paying the
price for the public authorities' self-abandonment to the platform
billionaires. The
economic model of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and the like is
inherently corrupt because their success grows in proportion to their
addictive effect and the number of addicts. Maximizing their profitability requires the overconsumption of their services. We are facing, it will be seen, a major public health problem here.
They don't have to stand for election every four years
All
these men with their excessive power meet with the heads of state,
usually at their request, and negotiate with them on a peer-to-peer
basis. In
reality, they earn a hundred times more than the latter, are a thousand
times richer and, above all, their power is much less ephemeral: they
cannot be removed from office at every election. Unlike
elected representatives, these billionaires are not “hemmed in by
obstacles”, as Musk put it to justify why he prefers his job to that of
head of state. Sometimes they even go so far as to interfere in the game of diplomacy: The
same Musk has seen fit to present to the public his plan for peace in
Ukraine (favorable to Russia) and to submit an even more unrealistic
statute for Taiwan (which favors China), much to the displeasure of
Washington, which supports the island's freedom and wants to defend it
in the event of a military invasion by China. Musk
has his pragmatic reasons for flattering China: China is a huge market
for his company Tesla; he owns a huge factory there and wants to keep
it, even if Sino-American relations deteriorate. Beijing, on the other hand, is worried that Musk could one day interfere in its conflict with Taiwan with his Starlink satellites, as he did in Ukraine.
It is hardly surprising that Elon Musk considers himself an excellent diplomat. Some countries send ambassadors to tech tycoons, implicitly recognizing their extraterritoriality.
When
Denmark appointed an “ambassador to the greats of Silicon Valley” in
2017, the country de facto recognized that these people have the power
of states and that their owners and leaders must be treated as super
heads of state. “If
you look at the influence these companies have on you or me, you will
realize that many of them have more influence than most nations,”
justified the first ambassador, Casper Klynge, after his appointment by
the Danish Foreign Ministry.
But
by treating these “supranational” companies like states without
territory, the Scandinavians also recognized that there is no fiscal
territory for them. If Google or Amazon are proper states, albeit without a territory, the US state is no longer responsible for them. So why should they pay taxes in the United States or the other countries in which they operate? Since
they are supranational, it is only logical that they set up shop in
countries where their profits are taxed little or not at all. They are imposing a new international economic order in which borders no longer exist and states are powerless.
Europe
is imposing penalties on them and the US is threatening to break them
up, but efforts to do so are still far from their goal. In
order to prevent new standards or regulations that do not suit them,
they employ whole armies of lobbyists - hundreds of experts and lawyers
with enormous resources - to endlessly discuss, delay and talk up these
processes. In this way, they intervene in the formulation of the laws that affect them. They seem to hover in a higher sphere than the weakened nation states, which are always too late.
The retreat of democracy
But aren't they basically protected by the fact that they are too big to fail , too big to be allowed to fail? Like
some banks during the subprime crisis, they are too heavyweight and too
important to the structure of the economy as a whole to be allowed to
fall: They would take whole sections of the economy with them - and the whole system of American computing. That is why they are protected and virtually invincible; attacking them would be a systemic risk.
Today,
at the beginning of the 21st century, we are witnessing a shift in the
center of gravity of power towards half a dozen men and their firmes-monde,
world companies in the sense of Fernand Braudel, i.e. economic and
political entities whose superpower should be sensibly regulated.
For
Richard Walker, professor at the University of California in Berkeley,
we are today just “the playthings of billionaires, far more so than the
large corporations that shaped the 20th century”.
The
more influence they have over states, the less democracy prevails, the
more arbitrary decisions remain and the more distortions of reality
grow. Because we have no control over them. This means that each of these companies holds the key to our future in its own field. Just
as not everyone can afford a sports car or a yacht or even a trip into
space (the first ticket for a short trip into space with Jeff Bezos on
board the Blue Origin has already been sold for 28 million dollars), not everyone will be able to afford an extended life or an expanded brain. Up
to now, lifespan and, above all, intelligence have not depended on an
individual's financial means, which has also enabled social advancement
(to a greater or lesser extent). But with them, everything will get worse.
So what can we do? It cannot be a question of destroying them, because their development and creativity serve economic and technological progress. By
controlling its tech giants, China has contributed to slowing down the
pace of its economic recovery after the pandemic and thus risks never
becoming the first world power, as it had planned. Nevertheless, you can't let “the free fox in the free henhouse” do as it pleases. The
rulers of social networks justify the fact that they want to know
everything about us by saying that they want to improve their services,
i.e. make us happier (even if we don't want that at all). People agree with this appropriation, because why should they reject something that is offered to them for free: Information
tailored to their interests, contact with people who are like them,
unlimited amounts of information, always more than they want? You don't reject “happiness” - even if everyone knows that the product is only free because you are part of it. The
risk of disinformation, i.e. the political danger, is enormous when
more than half of the population gets its information exclusively from
social networks.
The “robber barons” of the 21st century
Whether we accept their offer or not, we must set conditions for their global development. It is crucial that these new giant companies cannot shirk their duty to the tax authorities. They must pay the taxes they owe. Furthermore, they must not simply keep all competition at bay: They must let the young companies that may become their rivals live and not force monopoly revenues in the long run. They must also not disregard the laws on the protection of privacy: All citizens must be able to track and dispose of their personal data. Finally, these “supranational” powers must not violate the principles of public health: What content they offer must be regulated in such a way that it no longer jeopardizes the mental health of adolescents. A generation has undoubtedly already been lost.
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