Is Amazon on both sides of the market of law?

What if it exercises the administration of the law, being not only a party to a conflict, but also the authority deciding it?

Amazon, Google, Facebook are replacing territorial sovereignty with functional sovereignty

• Amazon is being wooed by Cities and States that bestow their own jurisdiction or charter city. Foxconn got special judicial procedures.
• Why not allow an online rating system to replace state occupational licensure rather than having government boards credential workers, a platform like MicrosoftLinkedIn could collect star ratings on them.

Territorial to Functional sovereignty is creating a new digital political economy.

Amazon combines tens of millions of customers with a marketing platform. It is a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house. And it’s a hardware manufacturer that outright competes with its merchants. And, it’s a leading host of cloud server space.

Online platforms are not “best service wins.” The network effects are a perpetual motion machine.

The more tribute merchants pay to Amazon, the more likely they are to achieve visibility in search results. You want to be in the good graces of the neo-feudal giant who brings order to a lawless realm.

As consumer rights shrivel, it’s rational for buyers to turn to Amazon (rather than overwhelmed small claims courts) to press their case.

The evisceration of class actions, the rise of arbitration,  boilerplate contracts make the judicial system a vestigial organ in consumer disputes. Individuals rationally turn to the giants for powers to impose order that were stripped from the state.

It is a transfer of power at tech speed,  from state to corporate actors.

Even the federal government has become an Amazon consumer as it privatizes critical procurement functions to extract deals that the Defense Department is itself unable to demand. P

Procurement premised on public purpose is a societal good.

When it is, instead, premised merely on the cheapest cost, it’s an open invitation to continue the same unethical sourcing that has plagued so much government purchasing, and give the end consumer, the American public, no legal recourse outside of Amazon mediation.

Only political organization can stop functional sovereignty from stealing the territorial governance at the heart of democracy.

Good luck with that. They won’t let you. You live on their planet now.

The End?