What Big Tech, the Taliban, and 13th Century Robber Barons Have In Common
Amazon, Google, and Apple collect some 30% for being middlemen. Companies and attorneys general are ready to revolt.
When 13th century merchants needed to move valuable cargo around western Europe, they had a single realistic option — water, averting a pothole-ridden hellscape of roads. Many favored the Rhine, the long, north-south superhighway that cut through German territories on the way to Rotterdam. But even there, the experience could be unhappy, beset by armed local feudal lords who lurked outside their castle strongholds. These Raubritters raised up chains across the waterway and exacted outsized tolls for passage through what they saw as their rightful turf.
In one of history’s best-known displays of citizen justice, an exasperated group of German merchants finally assembled what we would today recognize as a posse. One by one, their hired muscle razed the castles of the main culprits and dispersed them. Thus ended the reign of the robber barons, as the plunderers would forever be known.
I have encountered this sort of behavior myself. In the early 1990s, when I was covering Afghanistan, local mujahedeen commanders would pop up along the desolate main roads, an AK slung across a…
