Transnational Digital Domination and Transnational Platform Democratization

From both classic democratic and republican perspectives, the power exercised over society by Big Tech companies, and by digital platform companies in particular, has been identified as one of the major challenges facing contemporary liberal democracies. Both in theory as well as in (European Union) practice, counterproposals are being formulated in terms of a need for increased regulation of such platforms. When such regulation seems unrealistic due to the fact that the respective corporations are governed by non-European laws or because they can mobilize the political power of “their” governments to resist the imposition of regulation, often “digital sovereignty” is seen as a more radical measure appropriate to ensure democratic control by allowing citizens to use platforms subject to laws on which they have democratic influence (Pohle/Thiel 2020). In my paper, I argue that, on an appropriate understanding of the nature of platform power, these proposed countermeasures are insufficient, or even counterproductive, and a different strategy – transnational platform democratization – is needed: First, we need to identify the distinct character of platform power as a form of quasi-public domination (Aytac 2022) when we properly analyze the way in which such power not merely functions through interference with the choices of users (or indirectly, with other actions) but arises from the design of algorithms and the underlying digital infrastructure (Hoeksema 2023, Srnicek 2017, van Dick 2013, Lessig 1999). Second, the exercise of such forms of structural platform power are subject to self-reinforcing dynamics and network effects that systematically evade attempts towards post-facto regulation (Muldoon 2022, Aytac 2022), and that affect technological landscapes across legal boundaries. Third, to contest democratically illegitimate and dangerous forms of platform power, it is therefore not enough to aim at a restoration of indirect democratic control via the enforcement of democratically made law or regulation. Instead, liberal democracies must pursue a strategy of transnational democratization by investing in alternative technological landscapes that provide affordances for collective control over design and algorithms as part of a democratic digital commons (Hoeksema 2024).