In defense of massive companies - private corporations as public regulatory bodies

I’ll preface this by emphasizing that I’m no great supporter of the global capitalist system. Modern economic and industrial systems torture and kill billions or trillions of animals for a profit every year. Furthermore, many companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta are simply too big; this creates serious problems around market power, mass surveillance, and abuse of local communities.

With that said, there are some situations where large, for-profit companies can do a lot of good for society.

Consider the case of animal welfare standards. Governments in Australia and the United Kingdom, for example, tend to lag behind public opinion in terms of mandating improvements in animal welfare standards on commercial farms.

In contrast, private companies — including retail chains like Tesco and Coles, food companies like McDonald’s, and major hotel chains — can be much more responsive to public opinion. This greater sensitivity to public opinion means that these companies typically have corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and supply chain sourcing practices that are more progressive and strict than government regulations. Also, these companies often have strong links internationally, whether because they are multinational companies (McDonald’s) or because they necessarily rely on global supply chains (Coles). Many large companies’ supply chains cover as many animals as entire countries produce in a year, making this regulatory role significant.

This opens a new avenue for lobbying. Not only can animal advocacy organizations seek policy change from countries’ governments and subnational governments (e.g. state governments in Australia or constituent country governments in the UK), but organizations can also seek policy change from companies.

Much of the progress towards key animal welfare campaigns, like cage-free housing for hens and electrical stunning for shrimp, are made via this avenue. Then, once several major companies in a jurisdiction adopt a particular animal welfare policy, it becomes much more tractable to ask governments to apply that same policy across the full jurisdiction. This dynamic would not be possible if the market were made up entirely of numerous small businesses.

I haven’t thought about other cause areas as much, but I imagine this same dynamic can be applied to other worthy causes like child safety standards, environmental protection, and AI safety.

So while I’m no friend of capitalism, companies’ roles as a de facto regulator of production standards is one way for animal advocates to turn this situation to our advantage.