Google staked its claim to cyberspace as ungoverned territory beyond reach of law

Evidence

Google’s founders constructed a corporate form that gave them absolute control in the market sphere, and they also pursued freedom in the public sphere. A key element of Google’s freedom strategy was its ability to discern, construct, and stake its claim to unprecedented social territories that were not yet subject to law. Cyberspace is an important character in this drama, celebrated on the first page of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s book on the digital age: “The online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws… it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.” They celebrate their claim to operational spaces beyond the reach of political institutions: the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “dark continents” that drew nineteenth-century European speculators to their shores. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 330

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the colonial/territorial framing of extractive capitalism; connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s class/identity framing only weakly, but strongly to colonial-speculation literature and Arendt’s work on expanding capitalism. — connects to: Google’s mapping ambitions presupposed nothing in the world lay beyond its borders — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 446; The internet’s early borderless promise gave way to jurisdictional fragmentation — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 2314

Broader Connections

• The internet’s early borderless promise gave way to jurisdictional fragmentation #contradicts (0.75) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2314