Data, democracy and the rise of globalopolies

Wake up, they are too big to govern,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. But the damage was done. Because the Zuckerbergs of the world were way ahead of the game in making data the new currency, making its owners more powerful than governments, and richer than the GDP of nations, as they go about cartelising data and e-commerce. Punitive action now only serves as damage control for the spilt data, and punishing offenders retrospectively for breaches is a long drawn battle, as governments get down to formulating legislation’s that have failed to keep pace with the world of virtual reality.

Today, GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) are not only US companies, which are “too big to fail”, but perilously too big to govern. When a tech start-up was birthed and incubated in a dorm room out of Harvard, little did its founder realise the device and service he was going to provide would become as vital as breathing. Providing connectivity and convenience to every living being on the planet in exchange for eavesdropping into their personal and public life is not the phantom of a sci-fi futuristic world, but a reality we live with: exhilarating, yet spooky. And that is exactly the revenue model GAFA companies pursue, of personal surveillance through the Net in exchange for being the largest advertisers of goods and services. In outsourcing its data reservoirs to a third-party vendor like Cambridge Analytica, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa’s before US lawmakers, Facebook is complicit in a breach of trust, as encrypted information was extrapolated, perhaps even monetised, without the knowledge of the first-person it transacted with, which is you and me. Once users furnish personal data, that data exits from your database and is now out of your control. Data being a fungible commodity, can then be exchanged for a fee, and randomly replicated.

As Europe tightens its General Data Protection Regulation and other countries follow suit, laws that should have been proactively put in place, are now being contemplated reactively. President Macron, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Germany’s Angela Merkel have unanimously criticised the business models of these online behemoths, now larger than monopolies or oligopolies, to what I am terming as “globalapolies”. Globalopolies are a much vaster business module ever witnessed in business history, larger than oil giants of the last century when they gained global dominance. Though globalopolies contribute to employment generation in their host countries, they are under attack for not paying the local taxes they should; violating privacy laws, and do little to solve the negative externalities they create.

Typically, oligarchs were defined as largest private owners within a country who possessed sufficient political power to promote their own interests, and intensively coordinate their activities. Globalopolies are a cut above national oligopolies, as they attain global monopolies and are dangerous to capitalist societies, which are now dominated by a circle of elites who work in a coveted and exclusivist circumference to preserve their privileges by cartelising data and the Internet. In such spheres of influence, collective business interests work to the detriment of local societies, gaining an unfair edge over homegrown businesses.

The Cambridge Analytica leaks or the super-dominance of GAFA though, is bigger than money. It is about power and control. If India does not reign in foreign technology companies, it will suffer from 21st century corporate colonialism. India now needs to develop legislation on lines of Europe’s Data Protection Regulation and follow China’s example of allowing Silicon Valley companies to bring their technological expertise to train its entrepreneurs, but later abruptly turning protectionist in order to support indigenous start-ups. We do not need to succumb to modern-day East India companies, allowing globalopolies to “cannibalise India’s start-ups”, because we have the talent to build our own entrepreneurs with millions of engineers who have been trained to develop IT systems for the West.

A possible solution lies in the Election Commission considering a complete shut down on all YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter (YWFT) weeks prior to polls held anywhere in the country as part of a revised election code of conduct. Because new age elections and targeted messaging through advanced psychographics will increasingly dominate all future campaigns, and the EC must step in to insulate polls from digital distortions by blocking SM platforms. Precedence of bans already exists in J&K when the Internet was restricted on 30 occasions to prevent election interference and to quell protests and strikes. Further, user data generated on YWFT is stored in servers located overseas, and access to information held in these servers is regulated by US laws and international treaties. So the Government of India’s proposed safeguard is a step in the right direction to insist on servers being located within India to check cross-border exit of national data that could affect the electoral process.

It is now a conscious choice if both citizens and governments are willing to trade convenience for snoopery, because big data is chipping away at the electoral process of democracy, as elections will increasingly be campaigned through the Internet and the virtual world.