You have full access to this open access article. At the same time, those firms are increasingly intervening on the population level in ways that have implications for social and political life. This creates the potential for power relations of domination, and demands that we decide what constitutes the legitimacy to act on the public.
Business ethics and private law are not designed to answer these questions, which are primarily political. If people have lost the right to disengage with commercial technologies, we may need to hold the companies that offer them to the same standards to which we hold the public sector. This paper first defines the problem and demonstrates that it is significant and widespread, and then argues for the development of an overarching normative framework for what constitutes non-domination with regard to digital technologies.
Such a framework must involve a nuanced idea of political power and accountability that can respond not only to the legality of corporate behaviour, but to its legitimacy. Datafication poses serious challenges to the way people conceptualise rights and freedoms around the world. Privacy, justice, fairness and other fundamental values are being put under pressure by our digitising societies, and much of this process is private-sector led.
The economic power of technology giants has for some time been comparable to that of states Broeders and Taylor , and their political power is rising to match. This technological entanglement of the private with the public brings the global technology sector immense political power and with it the potential for domination Laborde and Ronzoni ; van der Sloot The political tools we have developed for controlling this kind of power have not so far been brought to bear on the private sector, and so far are offering little protection from the population-level influence they generate in the public and political spheres.
Problems occurring as a result of this kind of domination can be typologised as follows. First, there are problems arising from contracting. One example of the problems this can create is the interaction between the South African government and the firm Cash Paymaster Services, owned by the technology firm Net1, for the digital distribution of welfare payments Foley and Swilling When CPS was challenged in court and proved to have engaged in corrupt practices, however, it did not lose its contract due to the necessity of its public function.
