Corporate Quasi-Sovereignty: Big Tech and the Politics of Sovereign Authority in the Digital Age

As technology firms increasingly command digital infrastructures critical to societal functioning, traditional state-centric theories of sovereignty are proving inadequate. This paper introduces the concept of Corporate Quasi-Sovereignty (CQS) to explain how certain private firms, particularly in the tech sector, now exercise sovereign-like authority without legal delegation, institutional accountability, or democratic legitimacy. Existing models of sovereignty—idealized (Bodin, 1992; Hobbes, 1996), lived (Agnew, 2005), quasi (Lake, 2003), and hybrid (Srivastava, 2022)—assume that authority remains ultimately embedded within state frameworks. However, cases such as SpaceX’s control over Starlink in Ukraine (Kim et al., 2023), Meta’s confrontation with the Australian government (Bossio et al., 2022), and OpenAI’s role in shaping global AI regulation (Clayton, 2023; Sorkin et al., 2023) demonstrate that private firms can now override or bypass state decisions with little to no oversight. The paper argues that CQS emerges when three enabling dimensions converge: infrastructural command, executive autonomy, and normative or geopolitical assertion. These dimensions allow firms to act not just as market agents but as de facto sovereigns, able to determine access to information, communications, and normative governance across borders. For example, Meta’s unilateral decision to remove news in Australia was not merely a corporate protest but a sovereign-like veto of national legislation. Similarly, Elon Musk’s discretion in denying Starlink coverage to Ukrainian forces exemplifies how executive autonomy can have geopolitical consequences. To explain how these dimensions align into moments of sovereign-like intervention, the paper adapts Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) (Kingdon, 2011; Zahariadis, 2019). MSF originally theorized how problem, policy, and politics streams align to create “policy windows” for change. This paper reconceptualizes these as “sovereignty windows”, where firms collapse these streams internally, enabling unilateral action. In CQS, the problem stream corresponds to normative crisis framing, the policy stream maps onto control over infrastructure, and the politics stream reflects executive discretion. Founder-CEOs function as conditional policy entrepreneurs, collapsing these streams rather than coupling them externally. This internalization of authority allows firms like OpenAI to define the problem (existential risk of AI), propose regulatory frameworks, and present themselves as global custodians, all without institutional checks. Unlike earlier models such as the East India Company, whose quasi-sovereignty depended on imperial sanction (Stern, 2011), or AT&T, which operated under regulatory monopoly (Horwitz, 1986), today’s tech firms act with self-claimed legitimacy, insulated by dual-class share structures and infrastructural monopolies (Gorwa, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). This paper makes two contributions. First, it extends sovereignty theory by showing how political authority now emerges through private infrastructure, narrative framing, and executive discretion rather than institutional embedding. Second, it repurposes MSF to analyze corporate decision-making, revealing how sovereignty windows emerge in moments of regulatory ambiguity, geopolitical conflict, or technological disruption. The normative implication is urgent: as democratic institutions become increasingly reliant on corporate infrastructures, the authority to govern may shift from public consent to private discretion.