Social media platforms and digital information tools are the closest thing that Europe has to a true, transnational, multilingual European public sphere: the proverbial European agora. The now almost two years of life in a global health crisis has greatly accelerated the migration of our lives to virtual environments, moving workers from European commercial real estate to American digital workspaces, shoppers from European city stores to American and, to a lesser degree, Chinese digital retailers, and forcing masses of families, friends and lovers to replace embraces with emojis stored in American or Chinese servers.
These tech companies have often placed themselves beyond or above the law, defining for themselves their own rights and obligations. By corralling the digital public sphere and exploiting the often uninformed consent of the user, they have managed to replace the law with companies’ terms of service, over which national and regional authorities and agencies hardly have been able to exert control.
In a recent paper, ‘“A State in the disguise of a Merchant”: Tech Leviathans and the rule of law’, the legal scholar Christian D’Cunha has persuasively shown that large tech companies have taken on a host of functions that are the purview of the state and that the state has not only been incapable of presenting sufficient resistance but has often become complicit in the privatisation of governance and the erosion of the rule of law:
