9 - Protecting Fundamental Rights

Summary

Because technology companies play such a large role in governing our lives, we should expect them to constitutionalize their processes for making decisions that affect our fundamental rights. By constitutionalization, I mean particularly the introduction of limits imposed by companies on their own exercise of power.² This process of constitutionalization is the transformation of political limits that have historically only applied to governments to apply to a decentralized environment where many different types of actors can be said to play a governing role in society.³ This is the translation of the concept of the rule of law to formalize the “lawless” internal processes of powerful corporations in a way that limits and regulates how power is exercised. This translation is a shift away from purely legal conceptions of the rule of law that is essential to pursue if the core goal of the rule of law – limiting the arbitrary exercise of power – is to be achieved in the messy social systems of real life where governments are not the only bodies that regulate our lives.⁴