The Geopolitics of Digital Regulation
Contemporary regulation of new digital technologies by nation-states unfolds under a darkening shadow of geopolitical competition. The United States government operates simultaneously in a domestic political environment dominated by oligopolistic firms competing to expand, and in an international political environment wherein it competes against other sovereign nations by cultivating and deploying digital technological capacities for geostrategic economic and military ends. Thanks to the ensuing burst of crosscutting pressures, both national and supranational regulation can take on surprisingly reticulated, even baroque or perverse, forms.
Three recent monographs offer illuminating and complementary maps of these geopolitical conflicts and the national responses to digital technologies unfolding under their aegis. One proposes an ambitious, synoptic account of how geopolitical dynamics unfold: it is, impressively, the only genuinely all-embracing account of the field on offer at the moment—albeit one with distinctive analytic and predictive asymptotes. The other two books develop more narrowly drawn descriptive accounts that focus on specific regulatory dynamics. These depictions are still useful, but more limited in scope than a synoptic view.
Folding together insights from all three books, however, opens up pathways toward a new, more perspicacious understanding of geopolitical dynamics, and hence a vantage point on the most likely future of digital regulation. This perspective, informed by all three books under consideration here, suggests grounds for skepticism about the emergence of a deep regulatory equilibrium, celebrated by many, in expectation centered on the emerging slate of European laws. While regulatory regimes may reach for common solutions, the policy convergence reflects no meaningful European hegemony. Further, the area of overlap will be strictly limited to less important questions by growing bipolar geostrategic conflict between the United States and China. Ambitions for global regulatory convergence when it comes to new digital technology, therefore, should be modest.