Datafication-enabled advertising and other datafication practices, in the absence of proper constraints, will deepen the perils of datafication. A set of cross-border competition disciplines proposed in Chapter 5 may well be an effective instrument to address problems associated with platform monopolies and data capitalism. In this way, there would be less need for ex-post competition law enforcement in developing countries and LDCs, where relatively limited resources can be allocated to combat digital cartels and data monopolization. In this context, algorithmic transparency can serve as a starting point for global platform governance. The case study in Chapter 5 investigates the key dimensions of platform transparency requirements in a comparative context and demonstrates that the fragmentation of platform regulation is growing. The proliferation of platform regulations and algorithmic disciplines may place SMEs in an even more difficult situation vis-à-vis big tech companies, which have the resources necessary to manage different legal requirements in different countries. Despite the inherent complexity of the political economy surrounding digital capitalism, Chapter 5 concludes that there are reasons to be optimistic about better governance through international trade agreements.

Media platformization has caused problems that a state cannot easily regulate. The media content regulations considered in Chapter 4 are prime examples demonstrating the need to alter the power distribution in the Internet ecosystem. In terms of speech platforms, the “rules-based” platform governance model led by the EU, such as the DSA, now represents a strong power in balancing the US’ CDA-based social media self-regulation. The years to come will be critical to the global governance of digital platforms. Key indicators include whether more and more countries will adopt DSA-like regulations along the EU regulatory path. In terms of streaming services, the content quotas for video streaming platforms may constitute performance requirements for investment in services. This measure may also violate the obligations that apply to the nondiscriminatory treatment of digital products. Looking ahead, cultural diversity concerns regarding avatars in the VR space will be even more complex and will propel the “trade v. culture” clash to another level. No matter how carefully crafted, media content regulation must face enforceable reality. Trade rules that ban local presence would enable platform companies to supply services without establishing a local presence, which could significantly constrain a state’s ability to enforce platform regulations.

So as not to face potential disruption, universities will need to actively engage in the sector’s evolution as opposed to passively observing its revolution. To stay competitive, they will need to adapt pedagogy and content to ongoing changes lest they risk their irrelevance. They are advised to create occasions for relationship and community building, fostering students’ affection for and attachment to their alma mater, and to avoid the university’s being abstract in students’ minds. Instead of the current standard of one-time, early-life degrees (intermittence), lifelong learning and persistence over alumni’s entire professional careers appear to be academia’s model for the future. Universities must assure higher applicability of taught material to job requirements, as employers are increasingly launching own corporate universities offering nano- and micro-degrees. Finally, affiliation with edtech start-ups and big tech companies might be necessary to ensure the funding needed to navigate academia’s new online reality and thus bypass isolation.

Chapter 1 sets the scene, highlighting the rise of US dual-class stock success stories in recent years, before contrasting it with the rules of the FCA, which prohibit dual-class stock from the London Stock Exchange’s most prestigious listing segment, the premium tier.Regulators fear that dual-class stock incentivises controllers to extract personal benefits to the detriment of shareholder value.However, there has been a significant decline of UK IPOs in recent years, with a severe dearth of large tech company listings, with high-growth companies and unicorns seeking private finance options instead.The United Kingdom is subject to disproportionate levels of takeover activities, and thriving British businesses are regularly being purchased by foreign acquirors.Dual-class stock could, though, encourage and promote the listing of high-growth companies, enabling founders to divest of equity and generate further equity finance for growth, while insulating the management team, and its pursuit of the founder’s long-term, idiosyncratic vision, from removal by public shareholders and takeovers if short-term profits are low.Although the standard tier listing of The Hut Group was a success, it entailed certain compromises which emphasise the importance of the premium tier, and dual-class stock could be the shot-in-the-arm to resuscitate what has become a moribund IPO market.

In contrast to the United States and, to a lesser extent, China, the United Kingdom’s listed company tech market is threadbare, notwithstanding the pipeline of growing, successful private companies.As part of a package to support entrepreneurs and innovation, relaxing the premium tier prohibition of dual-class stock could attract flotations on the London Stock Exchange by enabling founders to divest of equity and generate finance for growth while retaining the control essential to them in pursuing their long-term visions.Although regulators, and institutional investors, fear that dual-class stock incentivises public shareholder expropriation by controllers, evidence from other jurisdictions, especially the United States, does not corroborate those fears, and many exchanges, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai and India have recently determined that the benefits of dual-class stock outweigh the costs.However, evidence also suggests that existing dual-class firms are excessively discounted by the market, and the United Kingdom could, therefore, accrue a commercial advantage by reducing the cost of capital for dual-class firms through the judicious use of constraints.By tailoring those constraints carefully as proposed in this book, ‘founder without limits’ will not be feared, but will be seen as a critical piece of the jigsaw in boosting the British economy in uncertain times.

I arrived at 8:30 to begin observations and interviews, and was met by Bill, the company’s chief privacy officer, a man in sneakers and jeans roughly in his mid-sixties.1

Inside the information industry, management leverages the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize work that serves data-extractive ends. Corporate bureaucracies work subtly to set privacy discourses among company employees, inculcating corporate-friendly understandings of privacy as frontline workers approach their work. Organizations hobble privacy offices and amplify voices that interpret privacy law in ways that serve corporate interests. Management also constrains designers in the design process, feeding software engineers’ ambivalence toward privacy and using organizational structures to make it difficult for anyone to build better privacy protections into the designs of new technologies.

Privacy’s performances begin with discourse. This is an important step. By influencing how we think about privacy, by inculcating definitions of privacy that are so narrow, outdated, and corporate-friendly, tech companies can ensure that even those employees who consider themselves privacy advocates will nevertheless end up serving data-extractive business models in the end.

The information industry’s discursive performances have influenced everyone, including policy makers, privacy professionals, and ordinary users of technology. The campaign has seen its greatest success in the United States, where tech companies and their allies are actively undermining the push for a comprehensive national information privacy law, where studies show many people have given up on the hope that they can adequately protect their privacy online, and where many privacy professionals see corporate-friendly privacy discourses as ordinary, routine, and common sense.1

This book has been about the tools the information industry uses to routinize an antiprivacy ethos and practice through its organizations. Of course, not all tech companies use all of these tactics: some use a few, some use more, some use none. But these strategies are in use, and they have the effect of marginalizing privacy throughout the everyday work of law and design. More than just a collection of strategies, they are features of informational capitalism. They help explain how data-extractive capitalism persists.

Through a long campaign to inculcate corporate-friendly discourses about privacy, the information industry tilted our legal consciousness away from privacy and enlisted even those employees who see themselves as privacy advocates in their data-extractive missions. This softened the discursive ground on which we think and talk about privacy and weakened the privacy laws we manage to pass. Technology companies then took advantage of public-private partnerships explicitly built into those privacy laws to undermine their effectiveness. They used coercive bureaucracies and took advantage of power asymmetries to develop compliance programs that reoriented and recast privacy laws in ways that served their surveillant interests. As a result, the information industry undermined the institutions that are supposed to protect our privacy.

How can privacy law and corporate commitments to privacy be on the rise without it having a significant effect on the designs of new technologies? Tech companies use the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize antiprivacy norms and practices in privacy discourse, compliance, and design. Those bureaucracies constrain workers directly by focusing their work on corporate-friendly approaches to privacy. As information industry workers perform these antiprivacy routines and practices, those practices become habituated, inuring employees to corporate surveillance even as they earnestly profess to be privacy advocates. The result is a system in which the rank and file have been conscripted into serving the information industry’s surveillant interests, and in which the meaning of privacy has been subtly changed, often without them even realizing what’s going on.

We are told that accepting widespread corporate surveillance is a natural progression for human civilization. Peter Schwartz, a senior vice president at Salesforce: “Gradually, we will accept much, much greater surveillance. And in the end we won’t be too bothered by it.” Thomas Friedman in 2014: “Privacy is over.” Mark Zuckerberg in 2010: “The age of privacy is over.” Sun Microsystem’s former CEO Scott McNealy in 1999: We “have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”1

The introduction identifies the book’s two main contributions – i.e. the explication of the megacorporate concept and of the infinite times ideology – and situates the work with reference to current discussions of Big Tech. In doing so, it is first emphasized that whereas current discussions of Big Tech often adopt a critical, and even a moralizing, tone, the present work strives to comply with an ideal of amoral analysis. The following sections then detail two supplementary contributions that the book makes to the scholarly fields of business and society and organization studies. The first of these domain-specific contributions relates to the book advancing a philosophical perspective, and the second to its demonstrating that corporations can shape social considerations of much broader importance than is commonly recognized. After this, the book’s very simple method of construction, and its three-part structure, are described. The chapter concludes with a brief summary.