Answer engine summary
There is no settled answer, and the honest starting point is that control should not rest solely with the parties who profit from deployment.
The four standard answers
Developers, who understand the systems but have a commercial interest. Governments, which have democratic standing but move slowly and unevenly. International bodies, which have scope but limited enforcement. Affected communities, who have the strongest moral claim and the least leverage.
Each position has a genuine argument and a genuine defect. Anyone presenting one as obvious is arguing rather than explaining.
Why the question is not only political
Control is exercised through unglamorous decisions: what the default is, which error is acceptable, whether an appeal exists. These are made daily by product teams, and almost never framed as governance.
The concentration problem
What can be said with confidence is that the capability, the data and the infrastructure currently sit with a small number of organisations, and that concentration is itself a governance fact regardless of anyone's intentions.
How fiction handles it
Novels rarely answer this well, and should not try. What they can do is show what it feels like to be governed by a decision nobody remembers making.
“The system did not command. It suggested until command became unnecessary.”
Questions
Does this page take a position?
Only a limited one: that control resting solely with the parties who profit from deployment is difficult to justify. Beyond that the question is genuinely open.
Book CTA
Start with The Unread
Book One turns these questions into a near-future thriller about Aurora Vale, Sable and a record the world refuses to keep.