GAFA + Microsoft's market capitalization reached a whopping $2.9 trillion last year -- bigger than India's GDP; their collected revenues are larger than Sweden's GDP.
According to the OECD, globally, states are not collecting as much as $240 billion a year in taxes. According to a 2015 report from the European Parliament, the EU loses as much as 70 billion euros a year because of "fiscal optimization," due uniquely to the transfer of GAFA profits towards fiscal paradises.
So what we have is GAFA working as political parties, actively changing the world without ever submitting themselves to a vote. It's a case of "freedom" being incompatible with Western liberal democracy. That's exactly what PayPal founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009; "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
In The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press), Frank Pasquale stresses how the industry, facing no accountability, will end up risking the very own legitimacy of sovereign states.
Which brings us to the monopoly question. Zuckerberg was asked if he considered Facebook a monopoly. Brussels certainly does, in its drive to regulate an economic model based on systematic smashing of competition and limitless privatization of personal data (which the EU has been unable to stop). Once again Peter Thiel, one of Facebook's earliest investors: "Competition is for losers."
The main complaint in Brussels, as officials stressed to Asia Times, is that the EU's "fair competition" model is being corroded. Yet the paradox is the EU -- because of ferocious fiscal competition -- is actually the largest tax paradise on the planet.
The EU condemns international tax evasion while the enemy inside is represented by Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland -- a sort of Bermuda Triangle of corporate tax. The savory combination of a single free market and a sophisticated service economy in which almost no physical goods cross borders offers unlimited opportunities for tax evasion. No wonder the digital giants have accumulated over $600 billion in tax-free profits.
The limits of "self-ownership"While GAFA in the US essentially controls the politics limiting the capacity for regulation, Brussels will continue to insist the only path towards healthy regulation comes from the EU.
The other model is of course China. Beijing has domesticated its sprawling digital industry -- which is a de facto extension of the state apparatus as well as a growing instrument of global influence.
When Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook should be broken up -- the monopoly issue once again -- he said that would weaken the US's competitive advantage against China, which by the way is fast disappearing.
Facebook's customer base though is not American; it's global. Inside the Facebook HQ, the consensus is that it is a global company. So all these issues at stake -- from monopoly to regulation to privacy -- are indeed global issues.
Zuckerberg dodged extremely serious questions. Who owns "the virtual you?" Zuckerberg's response was that you own all the "content" you upload, and can delete that content any time you want. Yet the heart of the matter is the advertising profile Facebook builds on each user. That simply cannot be deleted. And the user cannot alter it in any way.
The GAFA galaxy, in fact, owns you when you click accepting those massive terms and conditions of use. As argued by philosopher Gaspard Koenig, director of the Generation Libre think tank in France, data property should logically follow the evolution of property rights, land property, financial property and property of ideas, thus replacing the current figure of the "proletarian 2.0" at the heart of the value chain of the digital economy.
The whole debate may revolve in fact about algorithmic determinism. Every algorithmic model is influenced by economic and financial interests. "Our" data is de facto monetized by all those massive, user-friendly platforms. The four billion profiles generated every three months by Facebook are derived from content that real people produce and let Facebook use. Even Zuckerberg himself admitted he cannot lock down his own privacy settings.
Thus the key question that Libertarianism refuses to answer: If "self-ownership" is being configured as the future of our social contract in a secular world, how do we mere consumers profit from our rampant, digital marketization?
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