Should We Regulate Big Tech?
Technology
GCN Press Book Review
The Tech Coup
By Marietje Schaake
Princeton University Press, 2024
The author of this book is deliberate about using the word coup in the title.
“In fact, the word coup may not quite cover the full extent of the takeover and remaking of the US government that is happening,” writes Marietje Schaake, who is the international director of policy at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. “The merger between American politics and narrow business interests completely sidesteps the rule of law, in ways that will radically change the United States and the world for decades to come” (p. 7).
Schaake’s argument, in a nutshell, is that Big Tech companies have become so powerful that they are now overlords of our private lives, the financial system, and many government functions. With trillions of dollars in market value, the companies have gained extreme lobbying power, which they use to avoid public accountability. To the extent that the government cedes public functions to corporate behemoths, citizens are marginalized from self-governance as designed by the US Constitution.
“The great outsourcing of government is fundamentally rewriting the social contract between the democratic state and its citizens,” she writes (p. 101).
Ironically, says Schaake, taxpayers provide a major source of funding for the “coup.” Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, the AI companies, and Google have collectively received hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded government contracts in recent years (p. 245). Winning government contracts is not a problem per se, says Schaake; however, she argues that the companies benefit from public funding while resisting public accountability. They use intellectual property laws and their lobbying powers to avoid transparency and taxes.
As one example, Schaake recounts how, in 2019, Google obtained tax cuts when building a large data center in Texas. The company used a pseudonym to avoid a public outcry against Google’s brand. (Who would want to give Google a tax break?) Local citizens did not know that state lawmakers gave the tax benefits to Google until after the law passed. Other companies, including Microsoft, have used the same approach in other parts of the country (p. 71).
The book presents numerous examples of how lenient governance has permitted Big Tech companies to gain unfathomable power over public infrastructure and services, all without any meaningful accountability. Schaake covers how social media companies use Section 230 of the US Code to avoid responsibility for the damaging effects of their media products. She describes the rapid but largely unregulated embedment of private cryptocurrencies in our financial systems, even though these so-called “currencies” are widely highly speculative, and used for influence peddling and bribery, tax evasion, illegal arms sales, and drug trafficking. Moreover, she documents how governments are allowing AI companies—and paying them—to centralize data about nearly every aspect of our lives, including our banking and tax records, our locations, our communications, and our relational connections.
“The world over, technology has become a critical pillar in the high-stakes game of modern geopolitics—and democracies are losing,” writes Schaake. “Digitization has empowered authoritarian regimes (e.g., China), while democratic societies misguidedly continue to trust that free markets will lead to free societies” (p. 221).
Schaake is far from being a communist who wants the government to take over the private sector. She favors free markets. She disdains China’s use of technology for communist controls over people. Her book aims to protect a healthy free economy. However, her argument is that the vast but opaque power of Big Tech companies, who operate products and services for billions of users around the world, is seriously eroding citizens’ right to constitutional self-governance in a free society. Thus, she says we need to reform policy in ways that restore the power of citizens.
The last chapter of The Tech Coup presents specific policy changes that would, in her view, properly hold the Big Tech companies accountable. “Any law that applies to governmental organizations to maintain transparency and accountability should be applied equally to technology companies that execute tasks on behalf of the government,” she writes (p. 243). In other words, if the companies want to benefit from taxpayer funding, they should be accountable to the taxpayers.
In the meantime, citizens have no choice but to trust the companies to self-regulate. Those who are skeptical of or opposed to government regulation, which is certainly a valid position, must therefore trust that company leaders will operate their firms with high ethical standards. From a scriptural perspective, they would need to employ “love your neighbor” business ethics and suppress sinful human tendencies like greed.
Basing her position on recent evidence, Schaake is not optimistic about self-regulation.
“Self-regulation in the tech industry should not be a substitute for government oversight, and lawmakers’ policy views should not be steered by corporate lobbyists but by a deep commitment to the public interest,” she writes. “According to an old Dutch saying, ‘The butcher should not test his own meat,’ which is the equivalent of saying, ‘You should not grade your own homework’” (p. 185).
Even for those who disagree with the author’s central thesis, The Tech Coup is a worthwhile read. It is a well-researched, important book for helping us think about the massive and rapid technological changes that are occurring around the world.
Quote to Ponder
“The true cost of all the ‘free’ services we use on the internet may be our privacy and our ability to think.” — Kathy Kiely, journalism professor, in Overcoming Information Chaos (Upriver Press, 2025)