The Guardian, July 11, 2019: Google as a landlord? A looming feudal nightmare
As Google expands its geographic footprint beyond the digital world into physical urban spaces, the potential impacts of the company’s unchecked powers may become both obvious and intolerable. This year alone the tech giant will spend $13 billion, expanding in 24 US cities. In some places, the company will bring not just jobs but entire campuses with fully equipped offices, data centers, retail spaces and even residences.
Like industrial monopolies before it – from US Steel to the Pullman Company – Google is leveraging its significant influence to create entire urban economies dedicated to its own productivity and profitability. While this may sound like a recipe for economic boom, history suggests that the intimate intertwining of monopoly-driven corporate profit, governance and everyday life may undermine both democracy and individual autonomy. Already, much of Google’s geographic development has been shrouded in secrecy, making it nearly impossible for local communities to understand – and to oppose – the long-term impacts. Only through public record releases has the public learned that the U.S. locations of Google’s expansion have been influenced by furtively secured tax breaks.
Google’s physical growth across the U.S. may bring on a “well-wishing feudalism” for this new Gilded Age – exacerbating, rather than ameliorating, the inequalities that plague Silicon Valley.
