Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them.

Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.

These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, the algorithms deciding your information awareness, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of human rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.

I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And an ethics system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.

How should our collective values shape this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

Cultural understanding without regulation is just serfdom. That's basically what we have now where most people aren't willing to fight Apple/Google/Meta/MS.

We should break these companies apart - they should not have that level of power.