Session Chair: Sarah Florini
Presentation 1
POLICY AT ODDS- DIGITAL INDIA VERSUS INTERNET SHUTDOWNS
Manisha Madapathi
University of Hyderabad, India
The government of India, in 2014, launched a flagship programme called Digital India, with a vision to transform India into a ‘digitally empowered society and knowledge economy’. A similar intention is reflected in another initiative called BharatNet. The USO Fund was established with the fundamental objective of providing access to telegraph services, including mobile services, broadband connectivity and ICT infrastructure creation in rural and remote areas.
However, it is interesting to note that India has also been notorious at shutting down the internet. In Access Now’s report (2021), India has consistently raked number one, in the total number of hours spent under internet shutdown. In India, shutdowns have occurred during citizen protests like the anti- CAA protests in late 2020, and early 2021, and the Farmers Protest in 2021.
When we look at these two actions by the government- one, to digitise governance and provide connectivity to all citizens to digitally empower them allow for the participation in networked economy; and two, to disrupt these very connections when citizens use networks to express dissent.
In this paper I take a closer look at the policy documents and the building of information infrastructure that is written into it. While also studying how infrastructure gets suspended during dissenting movements led by citizens. I use the case of the two protests to understand this disruption. Using newspaper analysis and interviews, I examine how infrastructure gets denied and disrupted to citizens when digital networks are used in ways that are unintended by the government.
Presentation 2
FABRICATING STATELESS INCOME: DECONSTRUCTING THE DISCOURSES OF MULTINATIONAL PLATFORM CORPORATIONS’ TAX AVOIDANCE STRATEGIES IN AUSTRALIA AND CANADA
Harry Dugmore
University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
While upending domestic and global news media’s advertising income streams via the provision of superior “commercial datafication” (Mansell, 2021) and “digital tracking and profiling” (Christl, 2017) functionalities, Multinational Platform Corporations (MNPCs) have also implemented opaque strategies to minimize their domestic and global tax liabilities. These strategies have been an important contributor to both Meta and Alphabet’s surging profits over the past decade – from US$1.5b for Meta in 2013, to $39b in 2023 and, for Google, now listed as part of parent company Alphabet, from a US$12.73b profit in 2013 to US$74b in 2023. These spectacular levels of profitability have been achieved despite a proliferation of local and some transnational ‘diverted profits tax’ laws (Colbran, E., & Farhat, S, 2023; Dunne, 2016) designed to prevent companies from shifting revenue from high-tax countries to ‘low or no tax’ jurisdictions. MNPCs have been able to not just continue to transform the majority of their revenue into "stateless” income (Kleinbard, 2016), which is not taxed in the country where the income is generated nor, often, even in the country where the corporation is headquartered, but to get better at this and other forms of tax avoidance, via improving both their ability to strategically “navigate institutional complexity” (Kornelakis, A., & Hublart, P. (2022) and, as this paper argues, to shape national and transnational discourses about their strategies. In both Canada and Australia, these strategies continue to allow the deflecting of public and political pressure to support (or mitigate the disruption to) local news ecosystems.
Presentation 3
Big Tech Sovereignty: Platforms and Discourse of Sovereignty-as-a-service
Alexandre Costa Barbosa(1), Rafael Grohmann(2)
1: University of Arts Berlin; 2: University of Toronto
The notion of digital sovereignty has been mobilized by various stakeholders as a response to platform power. In the last decades, the concept of sovereignty has been applied mainly to State responses to exert power over other sectors and organizations. Therefore, the meanings of digital sovereignty have also been used and disputed by social movements, workers and indigenous communities. But the platform companies also entered into disputes about the meanings of this multifaceted notion. As an update of Californian Ideology, platform companies modulate their discourse to say that they are also concerned with issues of sovereignty. Thus, they are reappropriating the meanings of sovereignty through the launch of programs focused on sovereignty. We named this "Big Tech sovereignty", a provocation to mean how platforms have changed the meanings of sovereignty based on their own interests, such as the renewal of discourses in the context of "Silicon Valley dystopianism". Built on analyzes of sovereignty programs of Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet/Google, this article argues that "Big Tech sovereignty" is a way of trying to deflate the concept politically, giving it only a commercial and/or personal framework, being more of an expression of the platform power. Through the analysis of these “digital sovereignty” programs, the article demonstrates how companies framed “sovereignty-as-a-service”, especially in terms of digital infrastructures.
Presentation 4
Digital sovereignty and platformisation in China: platforms as national borders
Yuhan Wang
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
This paper demonstrates how digital platforms can be utilised as a critical terrain for researchers to examine practices of digital sovereignty in China. With the rapid development of digital platforms, our everyday life has been highly integrated with these platforms. In response to the expanding influence of platform companies, governments globally start to focus on digital sovereignty, which, in this paper, emphases a state control over digital entities. China has been an active champion of digital sovereignty in the sense that the state should wield supreme authority over its digital territories. The scholarly attention has predominantly been paid to the practices of digital sovereignty in China merely as a top-down oppression. However, from the perspective of Giddens’ (1984) ontological security, this paper proposes two complementary viewpoints that may diverse our comprehension of sovereignty practices in the era of platformisation. First, platform industry has been leveraged to facilitate the state to realise its responsibilities to citizens, e.g., improving public services. This is how the state gains its ontological security as a supreme power. Second, with the capabilities of digital platforms and a domestically engineered platform ecosystem, territorialisation can also be achieved through users co-configuring a national habitus with platforms, bordering a national space through everyday practices. Therefore, the practices of digital sovereignty emerge from dynamic interactions among the state, the platform industry, and the citizens.
Giddens, Anthony (1984) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, London: polity.
