History Main / OneNationUnderCopyright

* Happened briefly in ''TabletopGame/Battletech'' between 3057 and 3081 the Word of Blake, which was a quasi-religious organization that maintained part of the Hyperpulse Generator network used for FTL communication. They drove Comstar, the organization they'd split from, off Terra, then began setting up the Word of Blake Protectorate, a region of space where they controled (directly or indirectly) all the planets. It only ended when they were destroyed at the end of the Word of Blake Jihad, a period of 14 years when they essentially declared war on everyone else.

* ''LightNovel/RebuildWorld'': As an AfterTheEnd CyberPunk {{Dystopia}}, the government in the setting is TheFederation of various MegaCorp. There are officially five of them in charge of the Corporate Government at any given time, and it’s said that which five those are shifts over time due to shifts in power. Kugamayama City is a CompanyTown for Sakashita Heavy Industries, who also manage the FictionalCurrency aurum. Kugamayama with its UrbanSegregation is designed to be a DungeonTown based around collecting LostTechnology from NeglectfulPrecursors known as The Old World to whom monsters are actually ancient security systems. The government takes an extremely harsh view on debt (IndenturedServitude is common, and the default punishment for crossing them). They treat slum dwellers as CannonFodder and serve them food that’s radioactive or MysteryMeat filled with harmful {{Nanomachines}} to test if they’re safe to sell. And they are frequently engaging in one GovernmentConspiracy after another, including the frequent FalseFlagOperation of each MegaCorp attacking [[WeAreStrugglingTogether one another.]]

* ''Blue Planet'' has the Incorporate, corporations who bought "failed states" after a global famine with the consent of the UN to restore governance in those areas. They are run like corporations, but have their own armies, issue their own money and sit on the GEO (UN replacement) council just like nations.

* The little-mentioned Kel-Morian Combine in ''VideoGame/{{Starcraft}}'' is controlled by a bunch of mining guilds. The Combine worlds were annexed by the Confederacy (except for Moria itself, who joined up with the Dominion upon its formation) some years before the first game, but broke away from the Dominion following the Brood War. Rory Swann, the ''Hyperion's'' engineer, is from a former Combine world, he lost his arm in a rebellion against them.

* ''VideoGame/{{Bioshock}}'': What Rapture ended up becoming. Turns out the man who built it, a staunch anarcho-capitalist who claimed to love personal liberty and free enterprise and thought of the poor and less fortunate as "parasites", was actually very quick to toss his ideals aside when someone started to out-compete ''his'' business; his solution, of course, was to [[SecretPolice forcibly]] seize all the businesses that got too profitable for their own good. Thanks Andrew Ryan, [[{{Hypocrite}} you cheap bastard]]

* In ''VideoGame/{{Subnautica}}'', the Alterra Corporation that you work for is an interstellar "trans-gov", a transport corporation that bought out the functions of government a long time ago, and treats its citizens as employees, compensated and promoted by merit but ultimately owing everything they use back to the corporation... including, apparently, all the natural resources on 4546B that you harvest for your own survival, which you will be billed for upon your return to civilization (PDA: "Your current total stands at 3,000,000 credits"). Several PDA's also indicate that even personal relationships are treated as business contracts, with affection and time spent together being treated as commodities to be negotiated and traded.

Subtrope of PrivatelyOwnedSociety. Very common in the CyberPunk genre. If the story is set TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, then it more likely than not takes place in either a DividedStatesOfAmerica or [[JapanTakesOverTheWorld Japan]]. Not to be confused with DisneyOwnsThisTrope, which is specifically about copyrights and trademarks (though the two may overlap).

* ]]https://apnews.com/article/legislature-legislation-local-governments-nevada-economy-2fa79128a7bf41073c1e9102e8a0e5f0 There was a Nevada bill circulating]] that, should it go into law, would allow Tech Companies to create "Innovation Zones" which amount to said companies instating their own local governments.

* '''Literature/AgentG'' by Creator/CTPhipps has this as a downplayed trope with the aftermath of the Eruption. The world's largest corporations are granted nation-state status so they can help rebuild the global economy with its facilities treated like embassies and its workers having dual citizenship. In practice, it's just to increase their power as well as protect them from liability.

If taken to the extreme by the government owning ''everything'', this [[FridgeLogic raises the question]]: "What's the difference between these and DirtyCommies?" Some might argue that [[NotSoDifferent this is the whole point]]. This idea—that "business runs government" and "government runs business" [[TheHorseshoeEffect are basically the same]]—is at the heart of many, ''many'' populist and/or agrarian movements since at least the 19th century, e.g. Creator/GKChesterton's "Distributism".

** Later volumes also make the point that [[NotSoDifferent the Alliance isn't a shining example of a healthy democracy itself]] after a century of all-out war.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'' a possible government Civic for oligarchies is "Corporate Dominion", with the description stating that your empire is a MegaCorp that has supplanted the traditional state.

* ''Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg'' features [=AlgOstAsien GmbH=], a German corporate consortium which controls the southern half of China as a de-facto government under the nominal sovereignty of the Qing Empire.

* ''WebVideo/HellsingUltimateAbridged'' ends with America becoming one of these, on the grounds that corporations were people, it was decided at some point that they could run for president... the economy's a wonder, "given that it's now... the economy".

** In TheNewRussia, meanwhile, the "USSR citizens" also promote the notion that the current Russian government is but a commercial organzation, that the dissolution of USSR was illegitimate, and claim to be the true descendants of the Soviet authorities. Similar to their German and American counterparts, they also issue pseudo-IDs for a "fee" and refuse to pay their bills and fines on frivolous claims. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Slavic_Forces_of_Russia Here's the most famous one.]

* This idea is often used by "Reichsbürger" (literally "realm citizens") against the actual state of Germany to dismiss its legal existence. They argue that the entire German state post 1945 is invalid since, to them, it is merely a giant corporation, and every German citizen ([[{{Hypocrite}} except them of course]]) is and can only be "personnel" of that corporation. There are many different types, and almost all of them claim to represent any of a multitude of fake German exile governments who, according to them, are clearly the real and lawful rulers of the German state (this whole thing immediately falls apart by the mere fact that there are ''multiple'' exile governments all claiming rule against each other). Some of them even try to sell fake passports to gullible people, which naturally are not legally recognized by anyone, anywhere. Similar odd claims are made by the American "sovereign citizens", and fraudulent "states" have also been set up there, which also issue "passports" etc.

* ''{{TabletopGame/Cyberpunk}}'': The NUSA. Maybe. It's complicated. The [[FallenStatesOfAmerica rump USA that only really controlled the eastern seaboard]] attempted to nationalize [[MegaCorp Militech]] in the aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War, when the corporation was still weak. However, the corporation turned out to be TooSpicyForYogSothoth, and managed to insert a large number of people whose primary loyalty was to the corporation in key positions in the US federal government and civil service. The New United States of America is on the rise, but no-one on the outside is quite sure whether the elected officials or the Militech Board of Directors is calling the shots, or if such a distinction can be meaningfully made, considering that no candidate who didn't have Militech's approval has got past the primaries after the nationalization...

* ''{{TabletopGame/Cyberpunk}}'': The NUSA. Maybe. It's complicated. The [[FallenStatesOfAmerica rump USA that only really controlled the eastern seaboard]] attempted to nationalize [[MegaCorp Militech]] in the aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War, when the corporation was still weak. However, the corporation turned out to be TooSpicyForYogSothoth, and managed to insert a large number of people whose primary loyalty was to the corporation in key positions in the US federal government and civil service. The New United States of America is on the rise, but whether the federal government or the Militech Board of Directors is the senior partner is... unclear.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Subnautica}}'', the Alterra Corporation that you work for is an interstellar "trans-gov", a transport corporation that bought out the functions of government a long time ago, and treats its citizens as employees, compensated and promoted by merit but ultimately owing everything they use back to the corporation... including, apparently, all the natural resources on 4546B that you harvest for your own survival, which you will be billed for upon your return to civilization.
-->'''PDA:''' Your current total stands at 3 million credits.

** The Teladi are a race of [[LizardFolk anthropomorphic lizard-people]] with [[ProudMerchantRace an almost religious devotion toward profit]]. Their government is called the "Teladi Space Company" and their ruler's official position is chairman; The current chairman is named [[MeaningfulName Ceo]].

* ''VideoGame/TheOuterWorlds'': In the Halcyon system, the setting’s [[MegaCorp Mega-Corps]] have effectively become governments, to the point that discrimination is based on things like which corporation you were born into. WordOfGod describes it as a world where the robber barons of the late 19th/early 20th century never died out and now ''every'' town is a company town.

* ''ComicBook/{{Lazarus}}'' takes place in a FeudalFuture where society as we know it has collapsed and the families that controlled {{Mega Corp}}s have become the new nobility of the Earth. The setting strongly embraces BlackAndGrayMorality, and the best that people living under control of these families can hope for is benign neglect, and [[PragmaticVillainy possible comfort if you make yourself useful to the future of a family]], while the worst includes living in squalor as part of the brainwashed masses and being killed off by genetically engineered bioweapons or SuperSoldiers if one of these families decides that [[KillThePoor the population has grown too large to be supported]].

* Crossing over with NGOSuperpower, Saudi Aramco is ''the'' biggest company in the world, worth 10 ''trillion'' dollars. Owned by the Saudi royal family, it has diversified its assets into manufacturing, services, defense, and mining. In some ways, UsefulNotes/SaudiArabia is not so much a country with an oil company, but an oil company with a country.

* The old [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State Congo Free State]]. The people of Belgium were adamantly ''against'' joining the imperialism game, so King Leopold pulled some strings to have the whole thing done as a private enterprise initiative, turning the land into private grounds with a captive workforce that took in chains, ammo and mercenaries and churned out ivory and corpses. It eventually got so bad that the Belgian government officially nationalized the Congo, bringing them into the colonial system anyway. One estimate has it that the Congolese population was reduced by half in about twenty years.

* The Reedy Creek Improvement District, the site of [[Ride/DisneyThemeParks Walt Disney World]], is the closest thing to this trope that exists in the United States. The power of the state of UsefulNotes/{{Florida}} amounts to the collection of property taxes and little else [[note]]In addition to paying its state taxes, Florida exercises authority to inspect all elevators on Disney Property (though Tower of Terror likely doesn't count as an elavator for this purpose, as it functions like an elevator that should be shut down for safety violations). Disney World security also do not have law enforcement authority and will rely on county police. Disney security are allowed to shut down roads for events or detain shoplifters but cannot issue tickets. If the cops aren't called on you, the worst Disney can do is ban you from the property.)[[/note]]; the head of Florida's Bureau of Fair Rides Inspection admitted that he lacked the authority to even [[http://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-cia-helped-disney-conquer-florida enforce ride safety laws]]. Beyond that, the two towns Creator/{{Disney}} created to serve as the municipal government for the resort, Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, exist mainly to provide municipal bonds and friendly regulations, their combined population of about sixty hand-picked residents comprised entirely of Disney employees.

* The Reedy Creek Improvement District, the site of [[Ride/DisneyThemeParks Walt Disney World]], is the closest thing to this trope that exists in the United States. The power of the state of UsefulNotes/{{Florida}} amounts to the collection of property taxes and little else [[note]]In addition to paying it's state taxes, Florida exercises authority to inspect all elevators on Disney Property (though Tower of Terror likely doesn't count as an elavator for this purpose, as it functions like an elevator that should be shut down for safety violations). Disney World security also do not have law enforcement authority and will rely on county police. Disney security are allowed to shut down roads for events or detain shoplifters but cannot issue tickets. If the cops aren't called on you, the worst Disney can do is ban you from the property.)[[/note]]; the head of Florida's Bureau of Fair Rides Inspection admitted that he lacked the authority to even [[http://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-cia-helped-disney-conquer-florida enforce ride safety laws]]. Beyond that, the two towns Creator/{{Disney}} created to serve as the municipal government for the resort, Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, exist mainly to provide municipal bonds and friendly regulations, their combined population of about sixty hand-picked residents comprised entirely of Disney employees.