Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have established portals that people feel they have to pass through to conduct the business of life, and to participate in the common life of the nation. Such bottlenecks are a natural consequence of “the network effect.” It was early innovations that allowed these firms to take up their positions. But it is not innovation, it is these established positions, and the ongoing control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect, as in a classic infrastructure monopoly. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a grid of surveillance that continues to spread and deepen. It is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet accountability is the very essence of representative government. Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” If we take the man at his word, it would seem to raise the question: can the United States government tolerate the existence of a rival government within its territory? In 1776, Americans answered that question with a resounding ”No!” and then fought a revolutionary war to make it so. The slogan of that war was “don’t tread on me.” This spirited insistence on self-rule expresses the psychic core of republicanism. As Senator Amy Klobuchar points out in her book Antitrust, the slogan was directed in particular at the British Crown’s grant of monopoly charters to corporations that controlled trade with the colonies.