Big Tech is Like the Yakuza

In the days immediately after the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, investigators from the Asahi Shimbun documented how organized crime groups supplied food, water, and emergency goods to affected communities faster than official relief channels could mobilize. This was not unusual. The yakuza—Japan’s organized crime syndicates—have a long history of disaster relief, partly because it generates goodwill, partly because they maintain logistics networks and community ties that allow them to operate quickly when formal institutions cannot, and partly because disaster zones are also business opportunities.

The Japanese government’s official designation for organized crime groups is *boryokudan, meaning “violence group.” The yakuza prefer not to use this term. At various points in their history they have maintained public offices with plaques on the door, issued membership cards, and published internal newsletters. They are not exactly secret. They occupy a recognized social position, constrained by laws targeting their specific activities, but tolerated in part because they fill functions the state either cannot or will not fill, and in part because—as journalists and prosecutors have documented repeatedly—their networks intersect with legitimate business and politics.

Tech platforms now perform functions that governments once either provided directly or regulated others to provide, including identity verification, payment processing, and dispute resolution. When a seller on eBay disputes a transaction, eBay adjudicates the claim. When a developer’s app is removed from the App Store, Apple’s internal review process is the only available appeal. When Facebook removes content in a country with regulated speech, it is making regulatory decisions in a jurisdiction where it has not been granted regulatory authority.

This is what makes tech’s political relationships so interesting. Governments are simultaneously threatened by tech’s accumulation of quasi-governmental power and dependent on tech’s infrastructure to operate. The US government runs significant portions of its cloud operations on Amazon Web Services. The Indian government used WhatsApp—owned by Meta—for public health communications. The relationship is symbiotic in the same way that governments’ relationships with contractors always have been: the state needs services the contractor provides, the contractor needs the regulatory tolerance the state can provide, and neither has a strong interest in severing the arrangement.

The yakuza model also illuminates how platforms handle competition. Organized crime syndicates do not generally compete through price, but through territory. Territorial disputes are settled through negotiation, credible threats, and occasional violence. The enforcement mechanisms in tech may be different (so far), but the territorial logic is similar. Google defaults to Google Maps, Apple’s App Store prohibits payment systems that compete with Apple Pay, and Amazon uses its control of search ranking to disadvantage sellers who also list products on competing platforms. These practices are not illegal in most jurisdictions; they are exercises of territorial power by entities whose market position makes them difficult to challenge through normal competitive means.

So what do organized crime organizations provide in exchange for what they extract? The yakuza have historically managed significant portions of Japan’s construction and entertainment industries through a combination of legitimate business ownership and informal control over labor supply. The arrangement is not purely extractive: it provides predictability, dispute resolution, and protection from other organized crime groups—services that have genuine value in markets where formal legal institutions are slow, expensive, or inaccessible.

Platforms offer analogous services. Amazon Marketplace gives small sellers access to customers they could not otherwise reach. App Store review provides users a degree of protection from malware. Facebook Groups provide community infrastructure that many organizations genuinely depend on. The question that needs to be asked of both yakuza-connected industries and platform-dependent businesses is not whether the services have value, but whether the entity providing them has made itself structurally necessary specifically to extract rents that a competitive market would not sustain.

The yakuza are declining. Japan’s anti-organized crime laws, passed in 1992 and strengthened since, have made it progressively harder for syndicate members to interface with legitimate business. Banks will not open accounts for known members, Real estate will not be rented to them, and golf courses are required to turn them away. Registered yakuza membership fell from roughly 180,000 in the 1960s to under 20,000 by the early 2020s.

None of this happened because the yakuza became less useful. It happened because a sustained political decision was made to make the cost of association with them prohibitive for legitimate businesses. The tech industry’s political connections are currently a source of strength; this history suggests they can be made a source of vulnerability.

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Adelstein2023

Jake Adelstein: The Last Yakuza Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld. Scribe, 2023, 9781957363578.

Kaplan2012

David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro: Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (expanded ed.). University of California Press, 2012, 9780520269064.