By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The New Empires Of The Internet
The world today is a
geopolitical hot mess. One source of that messiness is a lack of consensus
among scholars and policymakers about the global distribution of power. Do we
still live in a world of U.S. hegemony? Is it a bipolar or multipolar world? Or
are states no longer the globe’s key actors, and do we instead live in an age
of “technopolarity,” where corporate titans such as Amazon, Apple,
Google, Meta, and billionaire Elon Musk are the new great powers?
The academic
cacophony is disturbing. Uncertainty about the distribution of power is not
merely a matter of debate; when actors disagree about the distribution of
power, wars can start.
Two books published
last year offer divergent takes on these questions. In Underground
Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman posit that the
United States still wields a considerable amount of structural power in the
global system. Anu Bradford’s Digital
Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, however, argues that the surprising superpower is
neither the United States nor China but the European Union.
Both books examine
the exercise of power and governance in the digital sphere. Their contrasting
evaluations help explain why it is so difficult for even the sharpest observers
of global affairs to agree about the current state of the world—particularly when
technology is involved.
Farrell and
Newman’s Underground Empire builds on the pair’s pathbreaking
2019 article in International Security,
“Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State
Coercion.” In that paper, Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, and Newman, a professor at Georgetown
University, posited that, across many economic sectors, globalization generated
a network structure that concentrated power in a few central nodes. States that
controlled those nodes—such as the United States—could exercise considerable
global influence.
Underground
Empire reminds readers of the article’s
core argument. In their introduction, the authors write, “The global economy
relied on a preconstructed system of tunnels and conduits that the United
States could move into and adapt, nearly as easily as if they had been
custom-designed by a military engineer for that purpose. By seizing control of
key intersections, the U.S. government could secretly listen to what
adversaries were saying to each other or freeze them out of the global
financial system.”
Underground
Empire expands far beyond this point,
however. There is an interesting discussion, for one, of how the private sector
helped create this centralized world and the conditions under which
multinational corporations have been willing extensions of federal power:
“Entrepreneur after entrepreneur discovered that the best way to turn a profit
in a decentralized economy was to figure out ways to centralize parts of it
again.”
Bradford’s Digital
Empires similarly builds on earlier work. Bradford draws from her 2020
book, The
Brussels Effect, which
argues that the EU’s combination of market power and technocratic capacity made
it a superpower in issue areas where Europeans preferred stringent regulatory
standards. In Digital Empires, Bradford, a professor at Columbia
Law School, contends that there are three great powers when it comes to online
technology—and each of them offers a different variety of digital capitalism.
As she describes it, “the US has pioneered a largely market-driven model,
China a state-driven model, and the EU a rights-driven model.”
These varying
approaches lead to horizontal clashes between the United States, China, and the
EU on regulatory and technological issues such as data privacy and content
moderation. Divergent digital preferences also create vertical clashes between
these governments and the tech companies supplying digital infrastructure and
services. The Chinese state cowed its firms into greater compliance with
government dictates; U.S. firms have been more willing to fight the federal
government on questions of data privacy.
EU antitrust chief
Margrethe Vestager gestures as she speaks during a news conference on the Apple
antitrust case at EU headquarters in Brussels.
Both Underground
Empire and Digital Empires are analytically sharp and
worth reading. Farrell and Newman pepper their narrative with entertaining
anecdotes—such as the fact that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) labeled
the internet’s international choke points after ski resorts. Bradford’s book is
encyclopedic in its range; her discussion of global online policy disputes on
issues including antitrust and artificial intelligence is comprehensive and
useful for anyone wishing to read up on the subject matter.
Comparing and
contrasting the authors’ arguments—as I am about to do—leads where they agree.
Both Underground Empire and Digital Empires stress
the importance of institutional capacity as a means that states use to exercise
power; some of Bradford’s arguments resemble those that Farrell and Newman made
in their 2019 book, Of Privacy
and Power. The new
books also suggest that the concept of technopolarity
does not have legs. After reading both books, one is likely to conclude that
state power will be able to pressure the private sector into compliance with
core national interests.
Nonetheless, what
makes these books such interesting reading is where they diverge: the sources
of state power in cyberspace.
For Farrell and
Newman, Washington retains considerable structural power because so much of the
digital world originated in the United States. This network centrality endows
the United States with the ability to surveil, influence, and—if
necessary—coerce other actors across multiple realms.
At least some of this
was by design: The authors write that, during the early days of the internet,
“[a]ccording to a former NSA employee, the U.S.
government ‘quietly encourage[d] the telecommunications industry to increase
the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based
switches’ to make it easier to spy on the world.” With China-U.S. tech
competition heating up, Washington has employed unconventional measures to
pressure China. These include the foreign direct product rule, which allows the
United States to ban the export of products from other countries if those
products rely on U.S.-made components or technology.
Overall, Underground
Empire suggests that some forms of structural
power are extremely
difficult to dislodge. As during the late 1980s—when many international
relations scholars believed the United States was in terminal decline, only for
the country to be the last superpower standing a decade later—commentators may
be underestimating current U.S. power in the digital world.
For Bradford,
however, what matters is the combination of market power, state capacity, and
attractiveness of a government’s regulatory preferences. This formula enables
her to predict that, going forward, the EU will be the most important
democratic actor in global digital governance. The EU’s lack of big tech firms
is a plus in Bradford’s model because it reduces the EU’s incentive to cater to
domestic interest groups.
According to Digital
Empires, the laissez-faire market-based U.S. model of tech governance is
losing its appeal both at home and abroad. Domestically, both major political
parties have soured on Big Tech, albeit for different reasons. Democrats
distrust the corporate concentration of Big Tech, while Republicans are
convinced that content moderation has an anti-conservative bias. Globally,
concerns about data privacy have made life more difficult for the Big Five tech
firms—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
As the U.S. model
loses its luster, Bradford posits that the United States will align more
closely with the EU against China’s more authoritarian model of digital
governance. For Bradford, therefore, what matters is not control over critical
nodes but control over critical markets.
The definitions of
digital power proffered in Underground Empire and Digital
Empires are not mutually exclusive. It can be simultaneously true that
the United States retains considerable structural power and the EU exercises
its market power adroitly—and all the while China tries to amass both forms of
power. Still, if there are arenas of contestation where U.S., European, and
Chinese officials disagree, whose form of power might prevail?
Here, one would have
to give a slight edge to Farrell and Newman and their argument in favor of U.S.
structural power. Bradford’s case for the EU is weakened by a few empirical and
theoretical claims that do not hold up. Her chapter on the “waning global
influence of American techno-libertarianism” is normatively persuasive about
the downsides of the U.S. model. Her claim that other democracies have turned
against the U.S. model, however, relies almost entirely on criticisms levied by
those countries after the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations rather than
meaningful policy change.
There are two other
areas where Bradford’s predictions are even more untenable. She suggests in her
conclusion that “tech companies were reluctant to moderate content on their
platforms but now increasingly concede they have a responsibility to do so more
proactively.” This claim has not aged well. After Musk stripped Twitter’s
content moderation team in 2022, other big tech firms followed suit. As the
Washington Post reported last August, “[s]ocial
media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political
misinformation, abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online
falsehoods.” There is no sign of this trend abating during this record-breaking
global year of
elections.
Bradford also claims
that the United States is moving toward the EU on AI regulations. “Artificial
intelligence may well be the next frontier of the Brussels Effect,” she writes,
adding that the EU’s AI regulation “may also serve as a template for other jurisdictions.”
But a recent Politico story about the clash of EU and U.S. AI standards
suggested a different outcome. EU member states such as France do not
necessarily agree with Brussels. U.S. officials, along with Silicon Valley
representatives, have also pushed back hard on EU standards. The result?
“Heading into 2024, those who want a lighter touch appear to be winning,
despite EU’s new binding rules on AI,” the Politico authors
wrote.
The sources of power
in cyberspace undoubtedly reside somewhere between Underground Empire and Digital
Empires. It is possible, however, that they may also shift over time.
Farrell and Newman’s argument holds considerable power for newer technologies
as they emerge; what Underground Empire reveals is that
geography matters even in cyberspace, particularly when the contours of any
technological network remain somewhat obscured.
As time passes and
technologies become more standardized, however, governments can also move down
the learning curve. At these junctures, Bradford’s arguments about market power
start to gain greater validity. This explains how both China and the EU remain
great powers in a digital world.
In the end,
what Underground Empire and Digital Empires suggest
is that technology can help international relations theorists better understand
the power debates that have haunted them since the days of Sparta and Athens.
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