“…As Laura DeNardis (2014: 1) argues, ‘the diffuse nature of internet governance technologies is shifting historic control over these public interest areas from traditional nation-state bureaucracy to private ordering and new global institutions’. In the face of such developments, many of states turn into digital monopolies to empower their sovereignty (Bulut, 2016; Everard, 2000; Kohl, 2017; Lu and Liu, 2018; Sunstein, 2017). Today, developing nations such as China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey have adopted policy measures to track the internet economy and advance sophisticated tools, for example, through installing malicious software on the devices of individuals without their consent, organising cyber-attacks, and interfering in the democratic processes of other nations, such as general elections and referenda (Marczak et al ., 2018).…”