The corporate cancellation of the US president Donald Trump in the dying days of his regime is in large parts entertaining and satisfying but also slightly worrying. If it is a harbinger of future corporate activism or large-scale political intervention by business interests, then Ireland is vulnerable to that trend because most of the companies involved are embedded in our society.
The extent of the vulnerability is not yet entirely clear. It is possible that this mass corporate intervention aimed at the highest level of US politics is a once-off that is solely down to the particular characteristics of Trump. He is, after all, so odious that it makes it extremely difficult for anyone, including journalists, to give due consideration to anything about him with real objectivity.
That is the deepest impact that the US president had on the media: his gross character and repellent behaviour has made it impossible for journalists not to take sides, mostly against him. Perhaps the same is true among those who inhabit company corporate executive suites, and that explains the ferocity of the cancellation. If so, then Ireland needn’t worry so much. But what if it isn’t?
With the Olympics and the Euros delayed by the pandemic, the mass invasion by Trump supporters of the US Capitol building last week was the global spectator sport we all needed. It felt as if everybody in Ireland, and everywhere else, was tuned in to CNN, a partisan news channel that exemplifies the anti-Trump media mode.
This probably explains why most of us over here have so easily swallowed the dubious assertion that this was a serious attempt at insurrection. It was no such thing. It was just a riot that, although dangerous for those in the building, carried little credible threat to the existence of US democracy. Do people seriously think that such a ragtag, disorganised bunch of headbangers and numbskulls brought a genuine threat to the trajectory of the handover of US political power? Only in CNN’s world could this be thought of as a proper insurrection.
It was, however, an abhorrent and extremely physically dangerous burst of public disorder incited by the US commander-in-chief. In the hours and days that followed, there was a damburst of corporate recriminations that has had the collective effect of cancelling Trump.
Twitter, Facebook and Youtube banned his accounts, citing the risk of inflaming further violence. Irish-led payments processor Stripe, stopped providing technology to facilitate donations to his movement. Amazon Web Services stopped hosting Parler, the chat site favoured by many of Trump's supporters, while Google and Apple united to boot its app off their platforms, which could kill it off.
Airbnb cancelled all bookings in Washington DC next week for election winner Joe Biden’s inauguration to stymie Trump’s supporters from descending on the US capital again. Wall Street banks, such as JP Morgan Chase, announced they would no longer donate to US political groups, which is meant as a means of damaging the outgoing president. Shopify removed his merchandise from its online retail platform. Even Reddit, which masquerades as the “front page” of the internet, deleted the Trump subreddit or discussion forum.
As the jewels in the crown of Ireland's foreign direct investment strategy, they also carry additional weight with policymakers
The whole thing is giddying, even if most of us know deep down that these interventions are forged more out of self-interest for the companies involved than any real concern for US democracy.
But, apart from a new-found desire to hurt Trump, what else have the active corporate citizens of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Stripe, JPMorgan Chase, Shopify and Reddit got in common? They all have significant operations in Ireland, which in Stripe’s case is also its founders’ (John and Patrick Collison) birthplace.
In the case of Google, Facebook and Apple in particular, those companies have significant sway with the Government, as they collectively employ more than 20,000 people here. As the jewels in the crown of Ireland’s foreign direct investment strategy, they also carry additional weight with policymakers. Their names serve as tungsten tips in the armoury deployed by the State’s trade authorities whenever they knock on doors in corporate America.
Even a cursory glance at the State's lobbying register suggests the influence of the planet's biggest tech companies in the corridors of Irish political power. Their attempts to influence government policy also stretch beyond their own narrow interests of data protection and taxation policy, which in any event are often proxies for elements of Irish foreign policy within the European Union. They have lobbied ministers on everything from the education sector to the running of the health service.
As a result, successive Irish governments have for years pursued a litany of policies, in particular on taxation and data protection, that have broadly met with the approval of these companies. Ireland has even been prepared to risk its reputation on these matters within the EU to maintain some of these policies.
If these newly-activist companies are prepared to take actions to stymie a sitting US president, imagine the political influence they could choose to exert, if it suited them, over a financially-puny State on the edge of Europe that badly needs their jobs, money and prestige?
Google already showed its willingness to interfere in politics here when it banned online ads at the zenith of a referendum campaign
Documents obtained this week by journalist Ken Foxe illustrate the depth of the challenge faced by Irish institutions in reining in the activities of these corporate superpowers. In asking the Government for more resources ahead of last October's budget, our Data Protection Commission, which has up to now regulated Big Tech's data activities for all of Europe because their headquarters are here, warned it faced an uphill battle against their "disproportionate resources". It was an extraordinary statement from a State economic regulator.
That is not to say that we should become all breathless and CNN-like about it. Facebook, Google and Apple do not run the State and they are not on the verge of subverting Irish democracy. But their willingness to take consequential actions to damage a US president should make Irish politicians a little more wary of their capabilities.
Google already showed its willingness to interfere in politics here when it banned online ads at the zenith of the referendum campaign over the removal of the 8th amendment on abortion. That decision directly benefitted one side of that campaign at the expense of the other, even if the eventual outcome was nowhere near close enough for it to have affected the final result.
Institutions of the European Union would love to take away from this nation the responsibility for keeping tabs on the tech giants that reside here. And it may happen based on the advocate general’s opinion issued this week.
We should let them. The titans of Silicon Valley have become too large and powerful for Ireland to handle.
