Embrace, reframe, or refuse responsibility? Tech companies’ multidimensional influence strategies in regulatory processes of data governance

This paper compares the strategies of three tech giants in influencing regulatory processes that shape the collection, transfer, and use practices of digital data. The increase in, and to a certain extent the effects of, corporate lobbying activities on the design of regulation, for example in the recent reform of the EU’s data protection laws, have been well established. Yet, this paper suggests that particularly the influence on the interpretation, implementation, and contestation of public regulatory processes is still not sufficiently understood. While the literature on platform governance has described the unique characteristics of corporate power in the digital age conceptually, comparative case studies have remained scarce. In this paper, I analyze how three tech companies, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft deal with moments of contestation that entail clashes between public and private governance and force actors to justify their regulatory preferences. Drawing on representative claims analysis of policy documents, court proceedings, and company blog entries, I argue that these private actors loosely follow three strategies to preserve or contest the regulatory status quo by discursively entrenching specific notions and allocations of responsibility. While Microsoft in recent debates on law enforcement access to electronic evidence strategically embraced responsibility to contest the status quo, Google, in the dispute around the right to be forgotten, reframed responsibilities after a first failed attempt to preserve the status quo. In contrast, in dealing with tensions around the regulation of transatlantic commercial data transfers, Facebook tried to refuse responsibility. The analysis of the multidimensional strategies of sustaining public and private claims shifts our attention to the contested notions and normative implications of corporate responsibility in the digital age.