CONCLUSION

As of this writing, the coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the planet and has disrupted the global capitalist economy. The pandemic has revealed an undeniable cruelty of the capitalist economic system, which bleeds public institutions and resources—libraries, healthcare, education, the US postal system, and public transportation—to a state of anemia that has disproportionately affected poor and working-class areas both in the United States and the global South, where there are few basic protections or social safety nets. Yet in the midst of this pandemic, which has killed millions of people, capitalist governments and elites have “reopened” the economy. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told investors in 2020, “Use the opportunity of the crisis to reconfigure and ensure the decisions you make now make you stronger when this lifts—in a year or maybe less.”¹ In order to seize new opportunities for accumulation, Google and other tech companies have quickly asserted that they care about people, as their PR machines have churned out an upbeat response to the coronavirus. Google and Apple, which are competitors in many sectors, showed their willingness to collaborate to build “contact tracing” apps for the coronavirus; meanwhile, the tech giants are ready to accelerate the commercialization, commodification, and corporatization of public health to profit from the pandemic. Schmidt opined that COVID should make people more “grateful” for Big Tech once and for all.²

This response from the tech sector brings one back to this book's starting point. Google tells the public that search is a free service because it cares, but the development of search has been shown to have been largely socialized by taxpayers, and the basis of the massive wealth of the industry has been extracted from public resources and workers.³

Search is ubiquitous in people's social lives. Humans are predisposed to be inquisitive. This basic domain of information searching used to be either informal or contained within the public sphere, where it was managed by nonmarket entities such as libraries and other cultural and educational institutions. Yet capital has gradually pried open and reorganized those institutions into commercial zones. The development of the search function with Internet connectivity in the 1990s seemed to show new possibilities for accessing and organizing information, and for bringing the pieces of the information domain that had moved to the market back into the public sphere. New technical capabilities for accessing and distributing information and the absence of a fully developed market-based model used on the Internet offered opportunities for cultural institutions to expand their influence in shaping information provision for the public good.

Despite its democratic potential and wondrous technical affordances, however, the search function has instead been reorganized by capital and transformed into a new commodity. Under state policies that encouraged capital to carefully structure the Internet into new economic growth zones, capital persistently innovated search engine technologies not to meet social needs but to construct a profit-making information enterprise whereby Google and other tech companies resorted to an advertising-based business model. But, this commodification of search has not taken place within deliberative public debates, nor is it a product of democratic consensus. Rather, capital-driven digitization of search is predicated on destruction and robbing of public resources—the process of “accumulation by dispossession.”⁴

The search engine industry has ravaged the public information commons, establishing new sites for profit making and engulfing the remaining nonmarket information domains, and it has become the leading edge of the information economy. In the past generation, ordinary people's information activities have almost completely migrated away from a patchwork of libraries, the Yellow Pages, newspapers, magazines, community, friends, family, and acquaintances and toward the transnational Internet-based information retrieval system. This shift has spurred new practices in social and cultural life expressed in terms of efficiency, democracy, and technological breakthroughs, yet it deepens market logics and is far removed from democratic information provision. By annexing public information provision and controlling information infrastructure, capital has gained a stranglehold on the information space and has turned search into a global industry. Our basic search activities are now solely dependent on the market. Fundamental information provision has been transformed into a lucrative market controlled by US-based multinationals.

Despite Google's 90 percent market share in many countries around the globe, there is intense competition. This drives cost-cutting, lowering of wages, and technical innovation. As Anwar Shaikh notes, “the profit motive is inherently expansionary,” so firms compete against each other.⁵ In order to maintain its dominance while facing intense competition from multiple directions, Google has sought to expand its influence in markets across the economy, weaving itself into every information and communication sector and beyond and shaping the political economy of the Internet. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple dominate their own areas, but the sectoral lines no longer exist as they compete, bleed into each other's territories domestically and internationally in search of new profit sites, and propel new capital accumulation projects.

Under this competitive pressure, to speed up the production process, control its position, and grow, Google's search business impels efforts to reconstitute global network infrastructures to outbid competitors as it fights to shave milliseconds from Internet traffic and places cables in new territories. The depth and breadth of network infrastructure constructed by Google and its US internet competitors, allying with local and regional telecom companies, illustrates how much of the world is integrated into transnationalized digital capitalism.

This titanic global search business requires particular occupational structures and labor controls for its ongoing competition, accumulation, and growth. The persistent myth of big tech has been that it would create a large quantity of well-paid occupations and lead to the disappearance of mundane low-wage work. On the contrary, capitalism's further integration of digital technologies has not, in fact, evaded the deskilling and degradation of work; rather, it has extended it as it continues to introduce and instill technical and organizational innovations to reorganize labor processes to increase productivity and profit. This has resulted in the growth of low-wage work and incorporation of unwaged labor. The search industry reflects this trend. The occupational structure of the highly automated and science-based company Google, for instance, consists of a small number of skilled and well-paid workers at the top, along with a mass of low-wage process workers and users who perform unpaid work. The bottom is expanding, defying the common notion that the new information economy will distribute wealth and reduce poverty.

Google's exploitative labor structure was initially camouflaged from the public since it was outsourced and fragmented widely over the network. Meanwhile, Google has long been portrayed in the media very favorably as defying its capitalist logic by empowering workers and seemingly relinquishing capital's control over labor.

In this era of austerity, when many workers struggling for survival are willing to accept wage cuts simply to hang on to their jobs, Google has been perceived as going against the grain by offering a system in which capitalism could be compatible with democratic ideals. The search business seems on the surface to have departed from industrial capitalism; however, Google shows characteristics similar to those of industrial enterprises, hierarchical labor organization, and the nineteenth-century labor control mechanisms. Relations between labor and capital at Google firmly ally with its corporate accumulation strategies by artfully applying the renewed welfare capitalism management techniques of the industrial era and combining them with the premise of “objective” science and big data. Google's “worker-centered” corporate management strategies show no signs of altering but, rather, actually deepening capitalist social relations.

Buttressed by its expansive global infrastructure, a global army of workers, and an exploitative labor structure and management, Google has impressively captured the most profitable and dynamic internet sector. Yet its success has also recast the strategic economic importance of information flows and communication networks in the expansion of global capitalism, which has reignited geopolitical rivalries. Despite the global dominance of the US internet giants, the evolution of search shows that the US information regime faces mounting challenges. This is because of structural changes to the political economy and a new geopolitics of information and communication including China's reentry into the worldwide capitalist system and Europe's renewed efforts to shape the global information sphere.

Although the Western media portray the Chinese Internet sector in terms of freedom, human rights, censorship, and authoritarianism on the web, this rhetoric conceals the changing political economy of the Internet. China's successful creation of a home-grown Internet industry that is substantially integrated into the global political economy is restructuring US-led global capitalism. China's advancement in critical technologies, which Europe hasn't been able to achieve, spurred a new rivalry between the United States and China. The former is aggressively engaged in safeguarding its primacy. To counter China, the US government has been mobilizing its political economic power. It is not only placing a range of sanctions against Chinese tech actors, creating barriers to entry, but is also flexing its muscles to arrange economic alliances, for example, pursuing a deal with the European Union for a joint investment in critical Internet sectors from AI and semiconductors to supply chains.⁶ The United States has to keep the European Union within its economic sphere of influence if it is to contain China. Meanwhile, Europe is on a tightrope and looking for a strategic balance between China and the United States to serve its own interests and assert its power by writing new rules and regulations for the Internet. The United States has even showed signs of willingness to restrain its domestic tech giants in order to accommodate Europe's assertion of new regulatory policies from corporate taxes to antitrust measurements and privacy.

This new geopolitical conflict animates the restructuring of digital capitalism in which all three of these major players are trying to reconfigure the Internet industry to serve their own interests as well as to renew global capital accumulation. For the United States, maintaining its tech supremacy is vital to its global power yet is a very complicated business. Deeply transnationalized global capitalism doesn't consist merely of major power states and multinational corporations; it is a system wherein multiple states, domestic capital, and local social and political actors are in a complex and ever-shifting relationship. Thus, the questions are: How and to what extent will the United States and China pursue their own interests without disrupting vital markets and destabilizing the shared project of the global capitalist system? How will Europe push new regulatory regimes without hurting its domestic capital, navigate between the economic poles of its two major rivals, build its own Internet sector to better compete within the bloc and globally, and keep a united front among all twenty-seven member nations? How and in what ways will these super-economic powers collaborate to privilege transnational (as opposed to domestic) capital and navigate domestic political and social interests? And how will various states manage as the ground continues to shift under their feet?

These questions pose the ultimate conundrum for the global powers, yet these questions are at odds with the United States’ self-appointed role in guarding technological democracy. Answering them gets us no closer to reorganizing the Internet to be a truly democratic, shared resource managed outside the marketplace or addressing the growth imperative of capitalism that brought the exploitation of public resources and workers. Where, then, is the hope for a democratic and emancipatory world when even the most basic function of search is being controlled and appropriated by capital? What are the possibilities for organizing a society where democratic information provision is possible?

The answer lies not in choosing between Google and another venture capital–funded search engine such as DuckDuckGo, or merely implementing various privacy tools developed by the US State Department and corporations, or negotiating with corporations and capitalist states to tweak capitalism to be gentler and kinder. Exposing corporate greed, demanding accountability, implementing government regulations, and breaking up giant corporations are vital moves toward a more equitable society, and these are hopeful steps. But merely altering corporations’ behavior to make them more socially responsible or moral, or creating more competitive markets by breaking up the giants, is not sufficient to reverse capitalist social relations.

If the history of search offers a lesson, the commodification of our basic search activities wasn't an imperative or a natural progression. It tells us that search can be de-commodified and reorganized as a global public good. If capital and capitalist states were mobilized to reorganize basic social and information provision into markets, the force of collective opposition lies with labor. Vivek Chibber underscores that capitalism as an economic system exists through exploitation of the majority working class, but at the same time, this majority can be the organizing force against capital, a force that challenges capitalist social relations.⁷ There are signs of hope in local, national, and international arenas where collective action by the working class in different sectors is resisting capitalism, which dispossesses, displaces, and brutalizes ordinary people and strips away basic public resources. Where are the points of struggle?

In 2022, more than a thousand coal miners in Alabama who were struggling to afford basic necessities went on a five-month strike demanding living wages and basic benefits; more than two thousand food couriers organized by Los Deliveristas Unidos, a loose network of immigrant workers demanding better working conditions, marched in Times Square in New York; and Uber and Lyft drivers pressured Congress to pass the Protect the Right to Organize Act, which would allow contractors to unionize.⁸ In 2020, 250 million people in India participated in a general strike to protest against repressive agricultural reforms that sought to deregulate and further open up the sector to corporations;⁹ and in Colombia, protesters around the country, in part mobilized by Colombia's National Strike Committee—made up of indigenous people, students, and trade unions—were in the streets against a regressive tax bill and to demand economic and educational equity as well as police reforms.¹⁰

However dispersed or fragmented they are, these are the forces that can dismantle the myth of corporate controlled digital capitalism—which persistently promises quality jobs, democracy, equality, fairness, and universal knowledge to people—and digital capitalism which insidiously generates further exploitation and injustice.