The End of Nation States? Part 1: Technology-Induced Sovereignty Transfers

Coexisting with meta-platforms

With a valuation of more than $4,100 billion, the five largest American tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) have symbolically outperformed Germany's GDP (the third largest economy in the world) in terms of valuation. Now, when Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg come to Paris, they are the ones who decide who they will meet among the French political staff. In many ways, they act as heads of state would: they impose their schedules on ministers, initially refuse a meeting with the Senate (Mark Zuckerberg), or even claim not to have time to meet the Minister of Economy (one of the leaders of American digital tycoons).

In more concrete terms, these companies are now omnipresent in international negotiations, be it regarding the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), agreements concerning the processing of data exchanged between Europe and the United States, or the reconsideration of the main tax principles, as envisaged by the OECD in the context of the BEPS (base erosion and profit shifting) project.

Yet the goal of these Western American players here is not merely to defend their economic interests, but also to promote a vision of the world based on the very values on which California was founded: nonconformity and libertarianism. The latter was largely inherited from the men and women who chose to settle in these remote regions to distance themselves from the straitjacketed spirit of the great cities of Eastern America.

This liberal mindset was later reinforced by the conservative revolution that brought Reagan and Thatcher to power in the 1980s. "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem", Reagan claimed in January 1981 - an idea coherent with the convictions of those who supported central institutions a century earlier. Since then, the idea that, thanks to technology, private players could profitably supersede the state and its public services in the functions they traditionally perform, has kept growing more popular.

Should we expect massive transfers of sovereignty?

Assaults have repeatedly been launched on different occasions and at regular intervals. One of the most famous blows took place during a rather dramatic dialogue between the FBI and Apple, with the former asking for the tools to read the encrypted messages on the iPhone of one of the two terrorists who shot 14 people in the San Bernardino case. Apple refused to give away access to its smartphones, citing the risks it would entail for the confidentiality of its customers’ data. On other occasions, Apple prided itself on defending fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy of conversations, in order to oppose the American state.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of messages are removed by Facebook's 10,000 moderators, thus transferring the management of freedom of expression to private players. While we can hope that Facebook does this in a way that respects minority rights, this is certainly not the case for many other platforms, such as Gab, the social network used by the Pittsburgh killer. 

Several countries (including the US) are currently considering allowing private players to take the law into their own hands when they are victims of a cyber attack by authorizing "hack-back’" i.e. the reciprocation of offensive technologies to the alleged perpetrator of the original attack. The irony lies in the fact that modern institutions were precisely created to prevent each and everyone from taking justice into their own hands. So how should we redesign the role of these institutions and of the nation state more broadly? The second part of this article will address the potential platforms hold in terms of public services, and its implications for the role of governments.