Landlords of the Digital Realm
When a few years ago I was looking for a flat in Barcelona, I noticed something. Real estate agents had rebranded as "relocation services" to sidestep tenant protections. Property owners offered short-term rental contracts to evade Spain's new housing law. The language changed, but the intention didn't. Profit depended on obscuring intention and avoiding accountability.
I recognised this logic. I had seen it before. Online.
Tech companies obscure their intention behind complex and unreadable privacy policies. Big tech firms invest heavily in lobbying efforts to influence EU regulations in their favour. The language changes, but the intention doesn't.
Housing, governed by rentier capitalists, is a domain of physical ownership. The internet, governed by surveillance capitalists, is a domain of digital ownership. The same market dynamics now operate across both. Once data came to be treated as property, it too became a resource for value extraction.
Today's tech giants (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft) are not just platforms. They are landlords of the digital realm.
The internet, like housing, has become a rent-based system. Just as people subscribe to rental contracts or mortgages, they subscribe to cloud storage, web hosting, Netflix, or Spotify. The monetisation logic of the physical world has bled into the digital realm.
Monopoly is no longer just a board game. It is a pattern shaping how both housing and the internet function.
In both, the logic is the same. Extract value, not because they must, but because they can.
The question is whether we keep renting, or start building our own.