Big Tech and its adversaries: Situating platform power within the geopolitical battle for data
Abstract: Perhaps there is no clearer indication of the primacy of data in this age than the overworked metaphors that are often used to describe it. In the last few years, data has been likened, aside from the hackneyed comparison to ‘oil’, to any number of (tangible entities) such as mineral deposits, (Hooper, 2017) dividend deposits, (Sumagaysay, 2019), and even the Alaskan Permanent Fund (Hughes, 2018). On the other end of the spectrum, commentators have also compared data to radioactive materials such as uranium and pollutants such as carbon dioxide (Tisne, 2019). As tired or inventive these metaphors may be, they signify a desperate need for a clear conceptual model through which we can think through the legal, social and economic ramifications of data. The comparisons of data to an asset are intrinsically linked to the question who controls this asset. In their 2006 book, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu narrated how the idea of a borderless Internet first ran into territorial governments. A decade and a half later, we see new battlelines being drawn, only now with large American BigTech companies and governments, more notably from the Majority World at its centre. The struggle over who controls the Internet has only continued its journey to becoming the important geopolitical tug-of-war of our times, with data—how it is collected, stored, protected, used, and transferred over national borders—being its most recent site of battle. This new geopolitical war has a diverse cast of characters and interests. In the last decade, the biggest technology firms Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and their foreign counterparts such as Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu and Tencent have created a ‘new dimension in geopolitics’ I will situate platform power as a consequence of data governance practices within this emerging geopolitical battle for data. Significant attention has been paid to the struggles between BigTech companies and governments in the US and EU. However, there has been little or no scholarly analysis of states in the Majority World flexing their power to not only rein in power exerted by BigTech players in their jurisdictions but also the use of regulatory muscle.
Author bios: Amber Sinha works at the intersection of law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and structures. Until June 2022, he was the Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India. He has led programmes on privacy, identity, AI, and free speech. He is a Senior Fellow-Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation studying models for algorithmic transparency, and Director of Research at Pollicy Data Institute, Kampala. Amber is a member of the Steering Committee of ABOUT ML, an initiative to bring diverse perspectives to develop, test, and implement machine learning system documentation practices. He also serves on the GPA Reference Panel of Global Privacy Assembly. His first book, The Networked Public, was released in 2019. Amber is the Director of Research at Policy.
Recorded Presentation | 26 April 2023
#Geopolitics #Law #Policymakers
