Abstract
In an era that has been termed one of post-globalization (Flew, 2021), there is considerable debate around governance of the global Internet. In particular, multistakeholder approaches which seek to bypass nation-state governments in the name of global ‘netizens’ have been critiqued as lacking real regulatory capacity to transform the behaviour of digital platforms towards public interest goals. At the same time, there has been a ‘regulatory turn’ (Schlesinger, 2020) in internet governance, with national governments – as well as the European Union – proposing an array of laws, policies, regulations and co-regulatory codes to address issues that include monopoly power, content regulation, data and privacy, and the uses of AI. It has been estimated that over 100 new forms of legislation, regulation and policy reports had been developed across multiple jurisdictions by May 2021, all of which pointed in the direction of growing state direction of the internet and its leading players (Puppis & Winseck, 2021).
The result is that Internet governance seems to be perpetually stuck between two registers. The global multistakeholder-based agencies such as ICANN, Internet Governance Forum etc. continue to meet, and to propose measures that assume a relatively stateless form of communications infrastructure. At the same time, with the growing ‘platformisation’ of the Internet (Flew, 2021), nation-states and supranational entities such as the European Union identify a relatively small number of global tech giants who dominate core activities in the digital economy (search, social media, digital advertising, e-commerce etc.), and who derive monopoly profits as well as social influence, political power and communications dominance, and who seek to rein in such power through new forms of regulation. For such activists and regulators, the Internet presents itself less as the borderless future, and more as a set of hegemonic structures akin to the industrial-era giants who prompted the first wave of antitrust laws in the 1920s and 1930s (Deibert, 2020; Wu, 2018).
The result is a growing irrelevance of global Internet governance regimes, as national governments proceed apace with setting their own rules around digital industries and online conduct. While a large number of nation-states around the world maintained some controls over the Internet – of which China is by far the largest – the regulatory turn of the 2020s has been a characteristic of the liberal democracies, not least the United States. It comes at a time when US hegemony over the world system is contested with the rise of China, the emergence of the European Union as a global standards setter, and an increasingly multipolar world. Bans on Google and Facebook in China are now matched by moves to ban TikTok and WeChat in the US, and questions of sovereignty and statecraft increasingly infuse debates about the digital future. Even long-time advocates of the Internet as borderless technology, such as Milton Mueller, founder of the internet Governance Project, now propose that the future of Internet governance lies in digital political economy (Interneet Governance Project, 2022).
What needs to be addressed within such discussions is the interconnectedness between nation-states and private corporate actors. These two elements combine, compete and come into conflict in the digital economy. Consideration of the relationship between state and corporate power requires us to critically evaluate who is benefiting from existing arrangements and in what ways. Juan Ortiz Freuler’s paper ‘The weaponization of private corporate infrastructure: Internet fragmentation and coercive diplomacy in the 21st century’ captures the extent to which, from the 2000s onwards, the United States government has increasingly asserted its territorial sovereignty over what it had presented as global infrastructure in order to advance its narrow national goals. Given that much of this infrastructure has been developed by private corporations, this has entailed not only conflict between the U.S. and other nation-states, but also a complex relationship between private capital and U.S. government agencies. Freuler argues that what we are seeing is the weaponization of corporate infrastructure, and the rise of a post-global information infrastructure, often referred to – erroneously – as Internet fragmentation.
In ‘The Role of Citizens in Platform Governance: A Case Study on Public Consultations regarding Online Content Regulation in the European Union’, Charis Papaevangelou considers the role that citizens play in platform governance as a way of critically reflecting on issues of inclusivity in and effectiveness of decision-making processes. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis enabled by computational methods to citizen submissions to the European Commission’s Public Consultations on the Code of Practice on Disinformation, the Recommendation on Tackling Illegal Content Online and the Digital Services Act, Papaevangelou argues that there are risks in seeing the contributions of citizens to such consultative processes primarily through the lens of a civil society discourse that prioritises the role played by formally constituted non-government organisations (NGOs) as representing citizen interests in such deliberative processes.
The recent policies of the European Union are also the theme of Nicolas Nicoli in ‘EU digital economy competition policy: From ex-post to ex-ante. The case of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta’. Referring to these four companies as the AAAM, Nicoli critically assesses the evolution of EU competition policy initiatives and the ways in which the Digital Markets Act, implemented alongside a complementary Digital Services Act, aims to move competition policy from the ex-post focus of antitrust policies towards an ex-ante approach that aims for more explicit engagement with questions of digital market design.
Meizi Su and Wenjia Tang’s paper ‘Data Sovereignty and Platform Neutrality – a Comparative Study on TikTok’s Data Policy’ places digital sovereignty questions at the forefront of platform governance. Taking the data policies of the Chinese social video platform TikTok as a case study, Suand Tang propose that there is need to move beyond models that treat US digital platforms as a norm, and Chinese platforms as an exception. Instead, we need to understand how the data policies of all digital platforms are forced to address the agendas of nation-states around questions of data privacy, data portability and data storage, and questions of nation-state sovereignty and geopolitical strategic competition play key roles in framing such choices by corporate actors.
A theme that emerges through this collection is a growing awareness of weaponization of the Internet. Weaponization of the internet can be executed by state actors, via platform regulations or relative policies, to achieve national goals and agendas, weighing ‘territorial sovereignty’ over ‘global infrastructure’. The Internet in this context can be ‘weaponized’ for agenda setting purposes, either by state or non-state actors. We are delighted to conclude this collection of papers with an essay by John Hartley titled ‘Strategic stories: Weaponized or worldmaking?’ Hartley observes that weaponization through media narratives has a long history, yet it is also continually updated, as seen with the recent Hollywood blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick. Hartley observes that while the construction of we/they narratives is one form of worldmaking, alternative models of worldmaking can draw upon the resources of popular culture to act as a pedagogic platform for class formation, activism, and the envisaging of alternative futures through collective action at a planetary scale.
In mapping out progress of platform governance in different regions, this special issue attempts to highlight the key questions mentioned above, who is the benefactor, how and why. Given the power of agenda setting by different actors, platform governance needs to be approached with more transparency. Policies needs to be improved, multi-faceted views need to be taken, and one thing remains clear: future forms of Internet governance will diverge form the recent past, while at the same time pointing to the continuing relevance of questions of sovereignty and a state-based global geopolitical order.