Google's founders constructed a corporate form that gave them absolute control in the market sphere, and they also pursued freedom in the public sphere. A key element of Google's freedom strategy was its ability to discern, construct, and stake its claim to unprecedented social territories that were not yet subject to law. Cyberspace is an important character in this drama, celebrated on the first page of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen's book on the digital age: “The online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws… it's the world's largest ungoverned space.” They celebrate their claim to operational spaces beyond the reach of political institutions: the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “dark continents” that drew nineteenth-century European speculators to their shores.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 330