said that Ant Group lacked a sound governance mechanism, defied regulatory compliance requirements, and engaged in regulatory arbitrage. It also said that the company used its market position to exclude rivals and damage the rights and interests of consumers.
Ma and his family ranked first as China's richest in the Hurun Global Rich List in (Hurun, 2020). As of this writing, Ma now holds fourth place, losing the first rank after Chinese regulators launched alleged anti-monopoly probes into his companies, Alibaba and Ant Group (Yu, 2020).
Clearly, when a government has the power and ability to control its citizens, people are going to resent it. When capitalism makes it possible for power to flip from nation-states to tech-states, the government and the people will resent it. This dynamic of one source of dominating power is problematic in many ways; that's why decentralization of power back into the hands of the people has always been appealing to the masses.
Dozens of start-ups now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Amazon's web hosting services, all on top of decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many of these alternatives have gained millions of new users, according to the data company SimilarWeb (Singh, 2021).
Many countries now offer alternatives to centralized governments in the form of decentralized virtual citizenship, which is a commodity that can be acquired through the purchase of real estate or financial investments, subscribed to via an online service, or assembled by peer-to-peer digital networks. In Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold, all to solve the problem of the imbalance of power dynamic (Bridle, 2018). Decentralization and putting power back into the hands of the people is a promising third alternative away from the power swing between tech-state and nation-state.
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