The Global Regime for Digital Governance

• In Event: Navigating Institutional Complexity in World Politics

Abstract

The global regime for digital governance is marked by considerable fragmentation both substantively and institutionally. A wide array of transnational bodies, international organizations, and private actors regulate a range of digital issues (e.g. internet governance, intellectual property rights and data privacy) in relative isolation from one another. In other words, this regime has failed to integrate like others have and instead consists of a governance system made up by several disjointed sub-regimes that evolve distinctively and heterogeneously, with limited opportunities for forum shopping. In this paper, we explain how the digital system has evolved from a hierarchical and semi-undifferentiated complex into a non-hierarchical differentiated regime starting from the 1990s. Building on historical institutionalist arguments, we show how powerful firms and states used incremental change strategies -- layering and insulation -- to shape subcomponents of the regime. When aggregated, these efforts have drastically reconfigured the regime complex into a stable yet highly fragmented governance system, opening up the potential for local experimentation and innovation. Our research brings together siloed conversations on digital governance, demonstrating that this was the intentional strategy of powerful actors. Theoretically, we show how incremental change strategies, well understood in the domestic politics literature, can be used to evaluate global interactions as well.

Authors

• Niccolo Bonifai

• Abraham Newman, Georgetown University

• Qi Zhang, Georgetown University