Algorithmic Governance and the International Politics of Big Tech

Abstract

Big technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon amass global power through classification algorithms. These algorithms use unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning on massive databases to detect objects, such as faces, and to process texts, such as speech, to model predictions for commercial and political purposes. Such governance by algorithms—or “algorithmic governance”—has received critical scrutiny from a vast interdisciplinary scholarship that points to algorithmic harms related to mass surveillance, information pollution, behavioral herding, bias, and discrimination. Big Tech’s algorithmic governance implicates core IR research in two ways: (1) it creates new private authorities as corporations control critical bottlenecks of knowledge, connection, and desire; and (2) it mediates the scope of state–corporate relations as states become dependent on Big Tech, Big Tech circumvents state overreach, and states curtail Big Tech. As such, IR scholars should become more involved in the global research on algorithmic governance.

Mysterious and Manipulative Black Boxes: A Qualitative Analysis of Perceptions on Recommender Systems

“…Who is promoting and lobbying what and why? Regarding such important questions, contributions from political science, international relations, and associated policy sciences are generally scarce (Srivastava, 2021). As for the DSA and recommender systems specifically, a plausible hypothesis can be presented for further research: the lobbying from Big Tech companies was successfully in limiting the regulatory scope to only a few weak mandates.…”

Data, Big Tech, and the New Concept of Sovereignty

“…The monopolization of resources and information by multinational technology firms is even more prominent because the production of big data in contemporary society mainly derives from various application platforms, and people's work or lives, study or entertainment, and even consumption habits are collected via various application platforms and delivered to the cloud. More importantly, the developers and operators of these application platforms belong to a small number of Big Tech firms [4,65]. In addition, algorithm research and development have high thresholds, and therefore, designing advanced algorithms requires large capital investments, professional research teams, and a solid early-stage technical foundation.…”

“…The government frequently lags behind Big Tech in data gathering, algorithm research and development, talent reserve, capital investment, and technological application, because, unlike the government, Big Tech has extensive financial resources, specialized tasks, and clear objectives. With the widespread use of data governance in the national governance system, the improvement in the national governance system will rely more and more on big data, new algorithms, and large technologies that master and manipulate these technologies [4]. This circumstance may result in three direct outcomes: First, the greater the prevalence of data governance, the greater the government's dependence on data and Big Tech that control it; Second, the greater the government's dependence, the greater the digital power granted to Big Tech, and the greater Big Tech's ability to act; and third, the greater Big Tech's ability to act, the larger the data acquisition scale, the faster the data processing speed, the more services provided to the government, and the greater the efficiency, the greater the stranglehold.…”

Transversal Politics of Big Tech

“…To account for the increasing economic, social, and political influence of Big Tech, social science scholars have coined terms such as "surveillance capitalism" ( Zuboff 2015( Zuboff , 2019, "internet-industry complex" ( Flyverbom, Deibert, and Matten 2019 ), and "(big) data capitalism" ( Chandler and Fuchs 2019 ;West 2019 ). Our discussion is rooted in these works, which understand infrastructure, services, devices, and knowledge production as part and parcel of what makes up Big Tech ( Arora 2016 ;Gorwa, Binns, and Katzenbach 2020 ;Atal 2021 ;Srivastava 2021 ). Big Tech "works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of 'smart' devices, things and spaces" ( Zuboff 2019 , 8).…”