Lawless Wild West or Self-Regulation? The Case of Anonymous Online Markets

Seven years ago criminal activities have gone digital at an unprecedented scale. Digital technologies enabled systematic exchange of illegal drugs, stolen credit card data, pornography, hacking services, weapons and other products and services. Due to a combination of anonymising software and virtual currencies, buyers and sellers trade legal and illegal goods and services on anonymous marketplaces (Barratt 2012, Martin 2014). While the availability of the technological innovation allowed its users to conceal their identity and physical location, they increased complication for law enforcement interventions due to a limited traceability (Aldridge & Décary-Hétu 2014). In addition, the anonymous markets on the Internet share some features with online platforms for legal goods and services such as eBay or Amazon Marketplace. These include user-friendly interfaces, customer reviews and a huge pool of sellers and customers (Tzanetakis & Stöver 2018). As of February 2018, almost two dozen platforms of varying sizes and feature sets are online (DarkNet Stats 2018). The paper examines two contradictory notions of the governance of illegal markets. Popular media, political decision-makers and scholars (Duxbury & Haynie 2018) have argued that anonymous online markets operate in a legal vacuum with no regulation at all. This notion feeds a popular myth of wild and lawless criminals making use every means available to conduct business. The second notion is referring to the internal dimension of governance of crime and addresses questions such as how do criminals conduct crime, how do they organise criminal activities and what degree of competition or monopoly structure do prevail on particular illegal markets (Andreas 2009, Jakobi 2018, von Lampe 2016). It is argued that while the first notion of the governance of illegal markets has limited explanatory power, the notion of the internal dimension of governance allows to better understand how buyers and sellers deal with specific uncertainties arising and enabling trade on anonymous online markets. Uncertainty is inherent in the legal and illegal economic exchange, deriving from criminal prosecution for production and distribution of products, as well as the anonymous environment on platforms on the darknet. Based on online participant observations, online monitoring of anonymous platforms and self-presentations of users, the paper shows that norms and rules of formal political authorities are violated on anonymous online markets, however, supply and demand serve to self-regulate through informal social norms, conventions, values and cultural beliefs, which have fuelled the growth of a global market for illegal goods and services.