In the complexity of the governance issues they face, today’s biggest platform businesses resemble nation-states. With more than 1.5 billion users, Facebook oversees a “population” larger than China’s. Google handles 64 percent of the online searches in the U.S. and 90 percent of those in Europe, while Alibaba handles more than 1 trillion yuan ($162 billion) worth of transactions a year and accounts for 70 percent of all commercial shipments in China. Platform businesses at this scale control economic systems that are bigger than all but the biggest national economies. No wonder Brad Burnham, one of the lead investors at Union Square Ventures, responded to the introduction of Facebook Credits—a short-lived system of virtual currency for use in playing online games—by wondering what the move said about Facebook’s monetary policy. In a similar vein, we might ask: In choosing to apply unilateral software standards as opposed to multilateral standards (as we saw in chapter 7), what kind of foreign policy is Apple pursuing? Is Twitter following an industrial policy based on investment in “state-owned” services or one relying on decentralized development by others? What does Google’s approach to censorship in China tell us about the company’s human rights policy?