For several decades, social movements have been vigilant of transnational corporations, their intrusion in global governance and their abuse of power.  The mining, petroleum, food and agriculture, pharmaceutical and financial sectors are among the groups that are most frequently objects of monitoring, criticism and mobilization. An important achievement here is the decision of the Human Rights Council of the UN to create an international instrument for transnational corporations and other businesses with respect to human rights.

However, activity in this plane has tended to overlook the global Internet corporations, perhaps because they appear more "friendly" due to the usefulness of their services in daily life. Yet over the past decade, this sector has stood out as one of the fastest growing, with accelerated monopolistic concentration, hand-in-hand with new capitalist dynamics that have their epicentre in Silicon Valley (California). Their main protagonists, -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, Paypal, Uber, Microsoft, among others -- extend their operations towards an increasing range of areas of the economy and society, where they form alliances with other transnational sectors, as part of the rapid process of transition toward a new technological paradigm, that will revolutionize our societies, for better or for worse.

Throughout history, technological innovation has allowed human societies to improve their living conditions. But when the control of these technologies is concentrated in a few hands, they can become tools to control society itself, consolidating the domination of certain power groups. This is particularly so in the case of technologies that can be applied to societal organization on a large scale, as occurs with digital technologies. In the hands of the citizenry or public systems under democratic control, they could bring great benefits, but the dominant trend is to privatization.

For example, present-day surveillance technologies, with cameras, sensors, etc., do not only serve to ensure security in a specific location. By collecting data that allow for identifying individuals (such as iris or face recognition) or vehicles (licence-plate readers), they enable those who collect this data to track the movements and behaviour of individuals. In the absence of an adequate framework for protection of rights, they can be employed for other ends, such as targeted advertising (according to what shoppers look at), discrimination (for example, when job hunting) and even harassment or blackmail[i].

These intelligent digital networks incorporate certain characteristics, distinct from older technologies, which are precisely what can contribute to power concentration.  First, the "network effect" (that is, the surge of users towards the most popular platforms) favours the larger companies, that form monopolies, absorbing or eliminating competition.

Secondly, the capacity of these networks to transcend time and distance allows for their remote control.  The individual who interacts with her device may encounter a greater variety of options than with previous technologies, but can only choose among those that the remote centre allows for. When whole communities yield such decisions to these remote centres, the problem is much more serious. Moreover, as a first condition, this implies that all the data generated is surrendered to these companies, constituting their primary source of wealth (especially via their sale to advertisers); but above all, they become the raw material of intelligent systems that must be fed enormous quantities of data to process and analyze.

A third factor is that these intelligent technologies increasingly have active controls incorporated into the system itself, such as algorithms, that in most cases are invisible to the user, and whose programming tends to favour the interests of their owners.  With the tremendous diversification of devices containing intelligent systems, of which we will see an explosion over the next decade, this problem will multiply almost infinitely.

Corporate control

All this is happening on a world scale, mainly under the initiative of these huge corporations and in accordance with their own vision of the future, and this is taking place with little or no input from a perspective of the defence of the public interest, and much less subject to democratic mechanisms of decision-making or scrutiny. This might be a controllable problem where it involves a limited function, such as digital trade or chat services. But it goes well beyond these, as these technologies encompass and transform entire sectors -- of transport, education, agriculture -- or even whole communities, as is the case of the so-called "smart cities".

In effect, the transformation of urban areas into "smart cities" means building enormous quasi-public systems, but often under profit-oriented corporate control, to administer traffic flows, health and communications systems, the electric grid, drinking water... An unlimited list of functions previously administered, or at least regulated by public authorities. Their advantage would be to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Their potential danger: the lack of democratic control and of guarantees of rights; in addition the data gathered to optimize the operation often remain as property of the company and are not returned to the city. They may also generate vulnerability when, to reduce costs, the company fails to invest in adequate mechanisms of security of the systems and data.

In diverse areas of social intervention, different expressions of this problem arise that will be very difficult to face in isolation. To mention briefly a few: in labour relations, the automation that we have seen in industry will be extended to service sectors, with an impact on employment among the middle classes; with "climatically intelligent agriculture", farmers will become even more dependent on big business; for example, Monsanto (now part of Bayer), is making huge investments in data systems and artificial intelligence (in alliance, among others, with the Bill Gates Foundation). In transport, self-driving vehicles are already under experimentation in streets and highways; soon it will be buses and trucks.

If to date, digital technologies are principally visible in communication, they will soon be involved in almost all areas of human activity. If they continue under the parametre of transnational corporate control, it will be very hard to tackle these issues in isolation within each sector. It is not that these technologies are bad in themselves: on the contrary, managed by human communities, they can bring great benefits. The challenge is how to recover this control, something that can hardly be achieved with scattered struggles, nor by focusing only at the national level. It requires a global and multisector approach, where one unescapable factor is the need to change the global regime of Internet governance. But there is little time left to set about this[ii].

14/10/2016

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop and the author).

Sally Burch is a journalist with ALAI. The present article is based on contributions of ongoing debates in the process of the Internet Social Forum and the Just Net Coalition (justnetcoalition.org).

Article first published in Spanish in edition 517 (September 2016) of ALAI’s magazine América Latina en Movimiento, titled “El poder transnacional y los nuevos TLCs” (transnational power and the new FTAs). http://www.alainet.org/es/revistas/517

The mazagine is a contribution to the debates for the continental mobilization “For Democracy and against Neoliberalism”, being organized by social movements in the Americas for November 4 2016.