Our era has been called as the “New Gilded Age”, shaped by growing inequalities and the novel forms of private control over the key infrastructures and platforms that shape our lives and democracies. In this context, the influence and regulation of major tech firms has become a defining social scientific and policy topic of our times, and the European Union (EU) has emerged as a global hub for the regulation of digital platforms and the Artificial Intelligence. Covering the academic years 2024–2028, the SEE-TECH project provides much-needed analyses on the relationships between big tech firms and the EU throughout the Union’s decision-making cycle, from the agenda formation in the Member States to the implementation of the key Acts in digital policy. The project studies how big tech firms aim to control the scope and impact of the EU’s novel regulatory regime in this field, both through their advocacy in the EU, and by influencing third countries that emulate EU policies. Through this latter angle, the project also provides important openings for assessing the global spread of digital policy rules (or lack thereof).
While Brussels-based EU institutions are most important hubs and imitators in the EU politics, much of the agenda formation that ultimately determines the final outcomes of EU rules begins in the capitals, especially those of the biggest Member States. Studying such agenda formation – including the role of corporate lobbying in agenda formation – has typically been done by political scientists in the context of one country at the time. While such research is important, it carries the danger of shedding too little light on the cross-border coordination of such efforts, especially regarding corporate advocacy. In other words, there is a risk that the political, coordinated agency of major Multinational Enterprises fades into background. To alleviate such risks, the SEE-TECH project assesses tech advocacy and agenda formation in major European capitals in research setting that emphasizes the cross-border nature of such advocacy work. We will conduct research both in biggest EU Member States, as well as in countries where major platform firms have an outsized role in relation to the national economies.
The period following the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have seen heightened interest by the globally significant digital platform and other tech firms toward the EU and its digital policies. Showcasing the dynamics around the growing role of the EU in global tech regulation, the ‘Big Five’ firms alone swelled their EU advocacy budgets ten-fold, to nearly €30m, in 2013–21. They are Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft. Some of their rivals are of Chinese origin (e.g. Alibaba & Bytedance [Tiktok]). Their business relies on a digital platform, which ‘brings together relatively well-established economic and socio-technical practices to create a new intermediary logic of data-rich accumulation’ (Langley & Leyshon 2021). While the sole European Fortune 500 tech firm is the German SAP (Bradford 2023), the lack of global leadership has opened avenues for the EU rules to increasingly become global norms (Bouza García & Olevart 2023).
In the turn of the 2020s, the focus of the advocacy efforts of major tech firms in the EU was in the recent pioneering EU directives, i.e., the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. The DMA sets rules for big online platforms, the DSA tackles issues related to algorithms and data handling, and the AI Act issues rules for AI models. This Work Packages aims at creating a comprehensive picture on the advocacy strategies that big tech firms have used in Brussels, and their impact. Have these advocacy strategies and techniques followed in the footsteps of traditional forms of advocacy in Brussels, or have they involved genuinely novel elements? Who have been the key actors and mechanisms, and how has the rapid upscaling of the presence of major tech firms in the EU shaped the broader advocacy landscapes in Brussels?
The new Acts in the regulation of digital technologies in the EU have centered significant power in the European Commission, given that the key Acts are applied in their entirety across the EU. However, national regulators still wield significant roles in the implementation and monitoring of new rules. Moreover, digital policy has also been traditionally shaped by directives (e.g., the Copyright Directive of 2019), where the national leeway in implementation is highly significant. Such tendencies highlight the question of how does tech policy formation operate in the member states that non-European tech firms use as their bridgeheads for the EU markets – and what roles does corporate advocacy play in these dynamics? Accordingly, this Work Package will study tech policy formation and advocacy in the implementation stages of the EU’s tech rules.
Recent years have seen lively discussions on the global exemplary influence of the EU rules, especially in the regulation of digital technology and related topics, and discussed especially under the “Brussels Effect” framework (Bradford 2020). Following this line of argument, the “gridlock” (Hale, Held & Young) in global governance has heightened the importance of the first movers in the regulation of emerging phenomena such as data protection and digital platforms. Often, the EU has been such a first mover, creating incentives for large firms for a global adoption of the reporting systems they devise for the EU markets. Finally, it has been argued that the blueprints created in the EU in emerging regulatory areas offer an easy way for third countries to quickly devise new national legislation, and that major firms have an incentives to lobby for EU-styled rules in third countries. While such “Brussels Effect” has been noticed espcially concerning data protection, limited empirical research exists on its applicability, veracity, and exact functioning in other fields. Accordingly, this Work Package makes new openings in addressing this little-studied field through country case studies in carefully selected countries.
We live in an era shaped by the growing importance of digital platforms and Artificial Intelligence, and the rapid, global spread of technologies, their regulations, and the corporate advocacy surrounding these phenomena. These dynamics call for novel conceptualization on the societal and political roles of major platform firms, as well as the global roles of the EU. As a cross-cutting theme, the SEE-TECH project will develop new theoretical approaches for making sense of these major shifts, with signifincant impact to everyone in the EU and beyond.