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Are technology corporations more powerful than states?

Answer by: , founder of Strategic Intelligence Lab · Updated: · לגרסה בעברית

In some domains, yes. The large technology corporations control infrastructure that used to belong to states: communications, cloud, data, satellites, payment systems and artificial intelligence models. A corporation's decision to block a service, move servers or change an algorithm can affect a country more than a decision by a foreign government.

But corporations lack three things that states have: territory, an army and the authority to legislate. The more accurate picture is therefore of quasi-sovereign actors: they act like states in some domains and depend on states in others. The central struggle of the decade is being fought on this boundary, in AI regulation, data sovereignty and digital taxation.

This is especially relevant to Israel. Its economy relies on high-tech, and a significant part of it operates inside multinational corporations.

This is the subject of Dr. Bella Barda-Bareket's doctoral research, Tech Empires and the New World Order, a qualitative comparative study of digital corporations as quasi-sovereign geopolitical actors. It is also the subject of her next book, "The Switch: Empire Without Territory", on how power moved from land to sea and from sea to the network.

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