These categories illuminate the choices facing the biggest technology firms as they work to shape global affairs. Even though technology companies, like countries, resist neat classifications, there are three broad forces that are driving their geopolitical postures and worldviews: globalism, nationalism, and techno-utopianism. ItвЂ™s time they started developing them, for not all technology companies operate in the same way. But they have no such tools for understanding Big Tech. Political scientists rely on a wide array of terms to classify governments: there are вЂњdemocracies,вЂќ вЂњautocracies,вЂќ and вЂњhybrid regimes,вЂќ which combine elements of both. Technology companies are shaping the global environment in which governments operate. They maintain foreign relations and answer to constituencies, including shareholders, employees, users, and advertisers. They bring resources to geopolitical competition but face constraints on their power to act. These companies exercise a form of sovereignty over a rapidly expanding realm that extends beyond the reach of regulators: digital space. It is time to start thinking of the biggest technology companies as similar to states. They have huge influence over the technologies and services that will drive the next industrial revolution, determine how countries project economic and military power, shape the future of work, and redefine social contracts. These companies are increasingly shaping the global environment in which governments operate. These were private decisions made by for-profit companies exercising power over code, servers, and regulations under their control. None of their actions in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, for instance, came at the behest of the government or law enforcement.

But technology companies are not mere tools in the hands of governments. It depicts technology companies as foot soldiers in a conflict between hostile countries. Most of the analysis of U.S.-Chinese technological competition, however, is stuck in a statist paradigm.

And although Europe wants to play, its companies do not have the size or geopolitical influence to compete with their American and Chinese counterparts. Nonstate actors are increasingly shaping geopolitics, with technology companies in the lead.

The same goes for Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. The aftermath of the January 6 riot serves as the latest proof that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are no longer merely large companies they have taken control of aspects of society, the economy, and national security that were long the exclusive preserve of the state. That is starting to change, as a handful of large technology companies rival them for geopolitical influence. States have been the primary actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. Law enforcement agencies have been able to arrest some individual rioters-but in many cases only by tracking clues they left on social media about their participation in the fiasco. Its efforts to establish a bipartisan, 9/11-style commission failed amid Republican opposition. Congress still has not censured Trump for his role in the storming of the Capitol. The speed of these technology companiesвЂ™ reactions stands in stark contrast to the feeble response from the United StatesвЂ™ governing institutions. Major financial service apps, such as PayPal and Stripe, stopped processing payments for the Trump campaign and for accounts that had funded travel expenses to Washington, D.C., for TrumpвЂ™s supporters. Amazon, Apple, and Google effectively banished Parler, an alternative to Twitter that TrumpвЂ™s supporters had used to encourage and coordinate the attack, by blocking its access to Web-hosting services and app stores. Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts of President Donald Trump for posts praising the rioters. But they werenвЂ™t the ones you might expect. Capitol on January 6, some of the United StatesвЂ™ most powerful institutions sprang into action to punish the leaders of the failed insurrection.

Computer stuck on just a moment