Geopolitical-economic conflict and network infrastructures

Schiller, Dan

doi:10.1080/17544750.2011.544085

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Through the terms of WTO accession, many domestic and foreign firms have been able to pursue their mutual interests by giving foreign firms access to the highly lucrative and growing Chinese market, and in exchange giving Chinese firms access to foreign capital (Zhao, 2008: 153). This process is carefully orchestrated by the Chinese Party State, which restricts and controls inflows of foreign capital penetration in its strategic industries, including information and communication as a way to nurture its domestic markets (Schiller, 2011;Zhao, 2005).…”

Section: China: Google's Exceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This process is carefully orchestrated by the Chinese Party State, which restricts and controls inflows of foreign capital penetration in its strategic industries including information and communication as a way to nurture its domestic markets (Zhao, 2005;Schiller, 2011 (Shaw and Chow, 2011). In 2011, the law firm Cadwallader reported in the Financial Times that 42 percent of Chinese companies listed on the US stock exchange were using the VIE structure, with thousands more unlisted companies operating in the same way (Hille, 2011).…”

Section: Liberalizing Its Information and Communication Sectors Was Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geopolitics of search: Google versus China?

Yeo

2016

Media, Culture & Society

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This paper focuses on the case of Google, the newly emerging US Internet industry and global geographical market expansion. Google's struggles in China, where Chinese domestic internet firm Baidu controls the market, has been commonly presented in the Western mainstream media in terms of a struggle over a strategic information infrastructure between two nation states -newly "emerging" global power China countering the U.S., the world's current hegemon and information empire. Is China really becoming an imperial rival to the US? What is the nature of this opposition over this new industry? Given that the search engine industry in China is heavily backed by transnational capital -and in particular US capital -and is experiencing intense intercapitalist competition, this perceived view of inter-state rivalry is incomplete and misleading. By looking at the tussle over the global search business, this article seeks to illuminate the changing dynamics of US-led transnationalizing capitalism in the context of China's reintegration into the global capitalist market. KeywordsGoogle, Search Engine, Geopolitics of Information, Baidu, Information Empire Search engine technology is so seamlessly embedded in our daily lives that it masks immense political-, economic-, and social battlefields. While the most frequently propagated notion of the search technology is a tool for "universal access to knowledge" or "equal information access to all," it has grown to become an indispensable component of the world's cross-border information infrastructure, circulating an array of new information, commodities, services and culture over an extraterritorial network -the Internet. Today, the search engine industry sits at the fulcrum of the transnational _____________________ Corresponding Author: ShinJoung Yeo, Loughborough University London, Here East, off Waterden Road Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, E20 3BS, UK Email: S.Yeo@lboro.ac.uk capitalist market system. It has woven itself not only into the information and communication sectors but also across a wide array of other industries including automobiles, manufacturing, home electronics, health, education, and fashion, reorganizing them into its own profit domains. The search engine is no longer simply an information retrieval system; rather, it is an economic infrastructure for the expansion of transnational capitalist markets as it has positioned itself strategically within the complex and dynamic extraterritorial network of the Internet. Understanding this, it is necessary to ask who shapes and controls this newly emerged critical information and communication infrastructure?Search, this essential infrastructure for the transnational market system, is dominated by the US-based search engine industry -mainly Google. As this new wave of US information industry is expanding its business profile around the globe, the US seems to be continuing its position of unchallenged information empire, controlling the major information and communication infrastructure as the country ...

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Section: China: Google's Exceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Liberalizing Its Information and Communication Sectors Was Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geopolitics of search: Google versus China?

Yeo

2016

Media, Culture & Society

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“…Certainly, the trans-jurisdictional nature of the internet means that the legal geographies of the contemporary digital world require rethinking, especially in light of calls for a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to understanding sovereignty to govern, and also protecting individual rights in the electronic age (Johnson & Post, 1996;Goldsmith & Wu, 2006;Brenner, 2009;Hilderbrandt, 2013;Svantesson, 2013;2017;DeNardis, 2014). These issues raise a host of additional contemporary and historical questions about attempts by the US to exert power over extraterritorial conduct in various fields including crime, intellectual property, surveillance and national security (see e.g., Bauman et al, 2014;Boister, 2015;Schiller, 2011). Yet dynamics are shifting with the emergence of the new technological superpower China, and regulatory efforts of the European Union (for example via the General Data Protection Regulation).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geopolitics, jurisdiction and surveillance

Mann

Daly

2020

IPR

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The rise of digital information communication technology has major implications for how states wield coercive power beyond their territorial borders through the extraterritorial geographies of data flows. In examining the geopolitics of data, transnational surveillance, and jurisdiction, this collection makes a significant contribution to the field of global internet governance. It shows how the internet is a forum for geopolitical struggle with states weaponising jurisdiction and exerting power beyond their own borders directly, and via infrastructures owned and operated by transnational technology companies. These dynamics challenge existing conceptual and theoretical categories of contemporary law across the fields of international relations, criminology, and digital media, and raise urgent questions about if and how individual rights can be protected in an era of ubiquitous transnational surveillance conducted by private companies and governments alike.

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“…The first body of literature provides an overview of historical and contemporary governance forms that emerge in digital transformation junctures and the transition to a digital platform economy (Feenberg, 2010(Feenberg, , 2011(Feenberg, , 2020Ferguson, 2017;Schiller, 2011Schiller, , 2020Van Dijck, 2018. The critical political economy of communication (CPEC) approach directs our attention to more significant national resource distribution issues and the historical asymmetries of power and information between coastal regions and interior regions of China.…”

Section: Critical Political Economy Of Communication (Cpec)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From surplus labour to behavioural surplus, Zuboff (2019) identifies how every human interaction is extracted as raw data and summoned by corporations or the platform ecosystem to produce commodities, anticipate consumer preference, and alter behaviours within a system of surveillance capitalism. Dan Schiller (2011) asserts that with such information capitalists' main drive is to maximize their corporate profits and answer to their stockholders instead of serving society. Essentially, information technology corporations continually expand capital accumulation and control by minimizing their costs and maximizing their resource utilization.…”

Section: Commodificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Economy of the Chinese Food Traceability System: Cultivating Trust, or Constructing a Technocratic Certainty Machine?

Dong¹

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The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that food contamination makes nearly 10% of the world population sick in 2020. Persistent food fraud also costs the global food industry billions of dollars every year (Reuters, 2020, para. 61). More than 50,000 Chinese citizens got sick or died from numerous recent food safety incidents, such as rotting "pigwash" food in the high school canteen, stinking pork turned into packaged oil, and deceased pigs with disease re-entering the market and ending up on the Chinese citizen's table (BBC, 2019;Wang et al., 2019). Not only have these incidents stirred up public rage and outcry, but they have also undermined the public's trust in the food safety system (Kendall et al., 2019). Furthermore, in contrast to local supply, the global food supply chain no longer presents as stable and reliable due to economic, environmental, and political disruptions brought about by the e-commerce law (2019), the Covid-19 pandemic, African swine fever, and the ongoing trade war between the US and China. The sheer scale and rapid spread of Internet food-related rumours have also spurred the Chinese government to commit to boosting local food production, bolstering public trust, and collaborating with "dragon head" technology corporations to build a large-scale, highly automated, market-driven, smart and technocratic food traceability system. Understanding the food traceability system also has much broader ramifications because it has become the prototype for how other public policy issues are approached. For example, food traceability apps were quickly repurposed and adopted by the Chinese government as the basis of a mandatory COVID-19 health app distributed to all Chinese citizens. The upshot of these observations is that the rapid development of the food traceability system in China over the last decade or so is a microcosm for understanding much broader processes of social, economic, political and technological development in China.

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Geopolitical-economic conflict and network infrastructures

Cited by 15 publications

References 22 publications

Geopolitics of search: Google versus China?

Geopolitics of search: Google versus China?

Geopolitics, jurisdiction and surveillance

The Political Economy of the Chinese Food Traceability System: Cultivating Trust, or Constructing a Technocratic Certainty Machine?

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