I think this "problem" stems directly from the fact that the geographic model of governments is extremely unsuited for governing on the internet.

In times past, Governments could e.g. regulate the quality of coke, control election misinformation or forbid burglaries on their own soil, because they had law enforcement who could imprison people doing these things against the law. What happened outside of their borders was mostly of no concern to them.

If Coca Cola wanted to sell their products in Germany, they needed people in Germany willing to sell it, and those people were directly vulnerable to imprisonment by German law enforcement, so they had to care about and follow German law. Even if the original corporation wasn't involved directly, there were always vendors, importers, store owners and such, and all of them could be targeted to some extend.

Tech companies are different, you can make a product on the internet that interacts with the data of the majority of German citizens, without ever stepping foot in Germany or even realizing that a country called Germany exists and has laws. If Germany doesn't like the fact that this product exists, there isn't much they can do.

For now, most countries still have some semblance of control, usually backed by the power of international treaties, DNS blocking and control over payment infrastructure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the prevalence of fast and affordable satellite internet on one hand and easier access to crypto on the other will make the situation even worse.

>It’s basically about catching up through international law, regulations, and enforcement, to make sure that the ideas that we have about what a democratic mandate looks like, what accountability looks like, and what oversight looks like are actually meaningful whenever activities happen in the digital sphere.

Who is "we" here, and which "democratic mandate" is being discussed?

The author was involved with the EU parliament? Excuse me for not taking their tech sector recommendations seriously.

I am half way through the book and like it. The book rubs against many of my own pro tech beliefs, and that is a good thing.

I have a hard time listening to this complaint about unchecked power coming from an entity that controls $20 billion of land, owns a $40 billion endowment, and receives most of its revenue from the federal government who is legally required to pay whatever price they ask, all while paying $0 in taxes on all of it.

So, the question is: "What can be done to put democratic entities back in charge" - supposedly wrestling control from the hands of "companies". And as an answer, she talks about war in Ukraine, as performed by US government. It's not even tangentially related to the question asked, how does it makes any sense?!

Then, in the next question: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information." What are "independent experts", where would the come from? Academia? NGOs? How really "independent" will they be? WHo will establish this independence and ensure it? It looks like quest for power - those guys do not deserve power, take power from them and give it to us, because we're the Experts, we deserve it!

Then: "There are no standards or reporting obligations requiring companies to say how much energy or water they’re using or plan to use." - why should they? It's their private business, why should they disclose this data to anyone?

Then Cambridge Analytica thing again. All political campaigns have been used behavioral data to get out the vote and influence results, but of course only for some campaigns it is extremely nefarious.

All in all, extremely sloppily done justification for grabbing power to control speech and development of digital economy, by people that do not have any justification for it and use "democracy" as if they own it, and only when they are in control it is "democracy" but if somebody else is allowed to play the same role they do it's "dangerous" and "harmful".

Look, pretty soon you are going to have to choose either left or right accelerationism. There is no in between. Acceleration is occurring whether you want it to or not.

Era of Cyberpunk is arriving! Interesting times indeed.

A bad actor with access to peoples private data from Facebook, Google, or Apple could probably blackmail a large fraction of politicians, globally. Someone with unchecked access to peoples private communications would have nearly unimaginable levels of power. It would also be fairly easy for these companies themselves to cover their tracks enough that it would be impossible to prove it wasn't a rogue employee or outside hacker acting alone.

We already had "the Fappening" when iCloud was compromised, but I feel if someone did something similar and kept the data private for blackmail purposes, we'd probably never hear about it.

Am I missing something here about how this wouldn't actually be possible? Frankly, I'd be surprised if it isn't already happening.

That was one of the worst written articles in terms of form, and the worst overall pitch, that I've read in a long time. It reminded me of a whiteboard of disconnected concepts that one might come up with when brainstorming for article support while using random association.

Besides lacking logic and therefore honesty in terms of why anyone should support her ask, the author is nakedly partisan and the ask is rank in its authoritarianism. Which aren't persuasive characteristics when pitching for more authority.

Either the writing should get better, or if it can't because the premise is horrible and dishonest, then at least learn to lie and cajole with more concision.

It's just an unfortunate title by her editor, the article is interesting. Silicon Valley is about building new companies, not large incumbents manipulating the world.