Marietje Schaake
Technology companies are out of control, have started to write their own rules, and are disrupting both the rule of law and competition. What can be done about it?
Mariatje Schaake was a member of the European Parliament (2009-2019) for the Dutch liberal party D66, is the director of the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, and is active in several think tanks and the UN advisory body on AI. In the European Parliament, she left her mark on trade and digital policy, where she championed trade freedoms, privacy rights, and more. She was dubbed „the ultimate digital MEP“ by Politico, and after her European mandate, she found success in US academia, offering a unique transatlantic perspective on the relationship between states and big digital companies.
In Tech Coup (September 2024, Princeton University Press), Schaake summarizes why she believes the situation is dire and what, if anything, can be done about it. The matter is far from small – just a few companies control the vast majority of the digital space. Many services operate as virtual monopolies, like Google/Alphabet. Some services, whose impact on human rights is unequivocally negative, are being normalized, such as surveillance tools like the state-favored Pegasus, or the facial recognition service Clearview (which Kashmir Hill analyzed in Your Face Belongs to Us last fall). Furthermore, some services risk being abused by third parties or having severe negative effects on politics: the Cambridge Analytica scandal remains fresh in memory, and Twitter (now X) became blatantly politicized to support one candidate during an election – a process that unfolded primarily after the book was published.
Incompetent States
It’s worth clarifying that Schaake is not an uncritical advocate of a perfectly functioning state. On the contrary, much of the book criticizes how American and European systems fail in their dealings with tech giants. Many elected officials on both sides of the ocean are clearly unprepared to understand the underlying issues. This has produced some fine, often humiliating internet humor. For instance, in 2008, we had “the internet is a series of tubes, and the movies in them jammed my emails,” and in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg explained that Facebook is funded by ads. The second example wasn’t necessarily a failure of competence by the legislator – it was more of a nice pass to smash. European legislators’ qualifications aren’t necessarily better; I’ve witnessed long negotiations on digital regulations for all of Europe, where MEPs and their experts were eager to introduce both full anonymity and age/name verification for users through personal documents.
These personal embarrassments are prime material for PR campaigns by digital companies, and indeed, many regulations are not ideally structured – problems often arise even at the level of implementation. A striking example is the ongoing Czech dispute between the Broadcasting Council and the Ministry of Culture over the interpretation of the Czech version of the European Directive. Should every content creator register or not? At a time when even a relatively trivial issue like this can spark a public interpretation dispute – with the minister promising to personally talk everyone through it – what about more complex regulations on a larger scale?
Where states are weak both in design and implementation, it opens the door to abuse. Schaake also rightly points out that big tech companies have almost completely dominated the public debate, paving the way for ‘malicious compliance’ – that is, complying with the rules in a way that satisfies the letter of the law but clearly undermines its intent and often harms the customer. This term frequently comes up in the dispute between tech titans Epic Games and Google, where Epic Games accuses Google of abusing its market power and “imposing a Google tax.” The monopolistic Google has no issue making adjustments so inconvenient that they raise the ire of users (as with map clicks) or endure prolonged litigation or win in a long-term PR campaign. A prime example is Google Street View in Germany – what was unacceptable in 2010 has become standard over time.
Why Are They So Good at It?
Schaake wonders what the tech giants have done so well that they are able to dictate the rules. Beyond exploiting the weaknesses of American democracy and the European Union, Schaake argues that the fundamental reason is something more symbolic than technological.
The tech giants have completely dominated the way we talk about and think about technology. Monopolistic companies have appropriated terms like ‘innovation’, ‘development’, and even ‘the internet’. Much of their advertising and PR focus on narratives like „states wanting to break the internet“ or „impose state control over the internet,“ which is rightly frightening. But the truth is that Meta and Google are not „the internet“ – they have merely become synonymous with it for a large portion of users. This section of the book is one of the strongest. In its clarity and practicality, it surpasses even Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ The Message, which devoted an entire book to how words and stories construct reality, using specific examples. From there, Schaake moves to how these giants have managed to dominate the American political system by strategically backing „friendly“ candidates (mostly Republicans, not exclusively though).
However, the strength of this section highlights the book’s relative weakness in addressing the root causes of the rise – and, more importantly, the maintenance of power – of tech giants, particularly in the area of economic concentration. Schaake touches briefly on competition enforcement and antitrust regulation, but this topic deserves far more attention. From a European perspective, Margarethe Vestager’s ‘we fine, and something happens’ approach has proven unviable. But more aggressive efforts in America, such as the Federal Trade Commission’s litigation under Lina Khan and the Department of Justice’s antitrust cases, have clearly been the most significant steps toward curbing the power of techno-oligopolies.
Where It Stalls
The book has its weaknesses. Many of the criticisms and examples are weak or controversial. It’s hard to argue against the notion that supplying spy systems to Iran and other regimes is problematic. But is it truly a fundamental issue for Nokia to supply basic phone infrastructure to a regime? Is it always a problem that services rely on ads? Do all supervisory boards in these companies truly „not work at all“? The list of scandals over the past decade is long and impressive, and it doesn’t leave out the major ones – many of which may prompt further reading, like studies on Facebook’s role in the Myanmar genocide.
However, these quality insights are offset by deeper, conceptual issues. The concentration of economic power and the ability of giants to buy out competitors before they even grow up is mentioned too lightly. More importantly, the book falls short on one critical argument: the cost of regulation. Schaake, now outside politics, has no reason to obscure the fact that effective regulation has social and financial costs. These costs are often worth paying—such as when implementing GDPR to protect individual privacy – but it’s impossible to pretend these costs are zero or that they will always be profitable. Such reasoning weakens the otherwise accurate analysis of the underlying problems.
The Way Out
The solution is only hinted at: increasing the competence of the state to create meaningful, effective regulations. It’s about clearly stating that the internet is not just a playground for the biggest companies, and they have no inherent right to set its laws and shut out competition. The current symbiosis between the state and big business must end. In light of recent events in the US, this final point may sound like a Cassandra’s warning. Elon Musk, a massive recipient of state funds and a man who hijacked an entire social network to support his chosen candidate, now heads the office that is supposed to oversee state spending. And apparently, this is his reward.If you haven’t followed the battle between tech giants and democracy over the last decade, Tech Coup is a great place to start and get a basic briefing. It may even challenge your thinking. If you’ve been following the topic closely, the case-by-case analysis might offer more useful insights. But if you’re wondering why anyone would want to regulate „your“ Google in the first place, this book is essential reading.