Hussein Shobokshi

With the rapid changes taking place in the world today, capitalist democracies face new and unprecedented challenges that require serious legal review that will not only affect the countries concerned but others as well. European governments are demanding that technology companies (all of them American) pay high taxes as a result of their great profits. These companies argue that a basic democratic principle is that there is no taxation without having the right to vote and that as digital companies operating in cyberspace they are not subject to censorship and are not limited by traditional rules, laws and regulations.

This debate is new and unprecedented and will establish a model for future judicial decisions, and, therefore, it is being closely monitored by all of those concerned, even though the judgment in Europe will mainly affect US companies.

However, this is not the only issue of concern to lawmakers and legal experts in capitalist countries. An anti-monopoly system exists in various forms, which prevents any company from having a share of the market that exceeds 60 percent. Such a market share is considered to be an implicit monopoly that can result in companies being broken up as happened in the early 20th century in the US with banks and oil companies and later with the giant telecom company AT&T.

Today, people are watching the exponential growth of Amazon, which provides the public with an effective and successful alternative to supermarkets by offering goods at a very low and competitive price. With time, Amazon has expanded its branches around the world, and in a new and unprecedented legal situation it operates in “digital” space where antitrust laws cannot be applied, providing a challenge for legislators and jurists.

It seems that breakthroughs in technology are posing a challenge to the democratic system itself. Today, Western governments are perplexed by technological advances as well as the impact of recent elections. There is concern about the possible restriction of the freedom of opinion and the danger of the integrity of the electoral process being affected by external forces. There is also a question of the tyranny of power and its use to conduct a harsh and deliberate attack on the freedom of the press and the expression of opinion.

The great English writer George Orwell foresaw all this in his timeless novel 1984, and the West seems to be currently living in the nightmare of the world that Orwell depicted.