‘Big Tech–Big State politics’ come of age: Dispatches from the archives

Abstract

In this article, we explore the spatial–political implications of an emergent Big Tech–Big State power axis and the anti-democratic authority it looks to wield. Drawing on participant-observation research within spaces identifying as fully inclusive, we argue that this public–private partnership must be understood as a burgeoning advocacy project that is ‘working’ the intersection of two domains: (1) blockchain-facilitated financial services and (2) human rights advocacy, law, and norms. Based on a joint revisiting of our research archives, we observe a synchronicity between: (a) advocacy of ‘digital’ rights-for-all and (b) ‘universal access’ to blockchain-based finance. This convergence of word and deed signals the embedding of what we call polycentric internet governmentality; ‘global consensus building’ consultations in which Big Tech manifests as an accredited political actor in ways that that go beyond the business sector's presence in inter-governmental or civil society-hosted consultations on media/internet – and now – digital/tech governance. When considered in tandem, the extra-judicial power at play over time is thrown into relief in both cases. We call for a re-conceptualization of the states–internet–markets nexus that undergirds internet/tech governance; as research fields, policymaking spaces, and political arenas.

Introduction

The power axis operating behind the scenes and world's screens proudly took centre-stage at US President Donald Trump's re-inauguration in 2025. The presence of Alphabet CEO Sundar Pinchai, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk encapsulated the long-standing flirtation between US administrations (Democrat and Republican) and hi-tech venture capital; increasingly prominent since the rise of the US-owned and run internet of the 1990s as it morphed into the business model of so-called Web 2.0 (Mandiberg, 2012). Evidence of a comparable intimacy, if not love–hate relationship between Chinese-owned Big Tech and the Chinese government notwithstanding, this triumphalist display of American techno-geopolitical ambition is but the latest in a series of manoeuvres to secure private capital's collaboration with, if not direct funding of, public policy agendas. These, ad hoc and orchestrated manoeuvres are material (infrastructural, financial, market share) and discursive (agenda-setting, high-level declarations, campaigns), conveyed through the rhetoric of freedom, innovation, inclusion, and development. While earlier stand-offs between US federal authorities (the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation) and tech giants (Microsoft, Apple, Google/Alphabet) may give the impression of diverging interests, American Big Tech's alignment with a US presidency premised on anti-democratic and white supremacist values marks a new milestone.

We ask, as critical scholars, how best to unpack Big Tech's stranglehold on the world's public and private spaces through its de facto and de jure colonization of online and offline life? How to research and more fully conceptualize the anti-democratic nature, and misanthropic implications of Big Tech–Big State policy alliances? To begin responding to such questions, we set out on a joint archival re-excavation of two research undertakings by conceptualizing Big Tech–Big State as a burgeoning advocacy project. We re-considered overlapping fieldwork findings on the forging of a would-be global consensus over a corporate owned and controlled ‘internet’; one committed to ‘thin’ regulation, and the erasure from public record of alternative techno-economic designs that may challenge Western American ownership and control of next-generation technologies. As our findings show, this policy advocacy project is well on the way to ‘capturing speech’ (Certeau, 1997; Franklin, 2013). Appropriations of terms such as ‘rights’, ‘democracy’, ‘inclusion’, ‘innovation’, and ‘freedom’ re-invent the tenor and substance of such speech in its own image, based on ‘good guy’ (Anglo–Euro–American) tech innovators versus ‘bad guy’ (Chinese, Russian) predators. The public records of state- and corporate-hosted events aiming to set global public policy in ‘tech’ or ‘internet’ governance domains bear witness to this gradual, stealthy process: as have we. We present the outcome of an initial retrospective comparison of participant observations and experiences in two, seemingly distinct, Big Tech forays into public policymaking over the last quarter-century. The techno-economic and political outcomes of public events and consultations (action plans, declarations of principles, jurisprudence, regulatory tools) are corroborated in our respective field notes, through participation in various listservs, coalitions, and networks, and contribution to projects identifying as inclusive multistakeholder enterprises.

First, we present a critique of key themes in the literature engaging ‘internet governance’, an overlapping policy-space and scholarly enterprise. We signal three lacunae in the literature concerned with the ‘politics of internet governance’. ¹ Our response to these lacunae is a call for a re-conceptualization of core terms, the ‘internet’ and ‘governance’ in particular as they have become reified, taken as self-explanatory. Second, through a conceptual synthesis we then move to posit a more fulsome articulation of the multi-sited, multi-scalar, and polyvalent characteristics of today's Big Tech–Big State power axis. Our concept polycentric internet governmentality encapsulates the multidimensional complexities of processes framing and comprising empirical and public record. Third, we offer a methodological note on the term ‘archive’ from research and real-time findings involving long-term, fully immersed participant observation. Ethnographic research modes such as this generate personal and public records, a range of ad hoc and formal archiving as epistemological and temporal–spatial practices of record-keeping. We substantiate these conceptual and methodological moves by way of two case studies, presented side-by-side for the first time. The cases provide spoken and written corroboration of the granularity of quotidian advocacy work from actors – ‘stakeholders’ – looking to make an impact on the form and substance of policymaking: civil society organizations, businesses, and governments. The details matter in how they co-constitute the spatial-temporalities of agenda-shaping ambitions of Big Tech–Big State actors aspiring to change, or influence outcomes, if not public perceptions of what is at stake at the macro-level (e.g. ‘global consensus-building’). We conclude by spelling out four implications of Big Tech–Big State's emergence as a fully accredited political actor with an overt advocacy project led by tech billionaires touting an anti-democratic and unsustainable agenda.

Internet governance theory and research: ‘mind the gap’

First, let us plot the scholarly coordinates of our combined research field, made up of adjacent spaces in which technological ‘innovation’ and ‘participatory’ policymaking characterize the convergence of media-tech-internet sectors (Council of Europe, 2013; Mansell, 2012). In these spaces, not only non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots groups but also entrepreneurs and corporations, governments and multilateral institutional actors, older and newer, have been active: United Nations (UN) agencies, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the UNESCO in the first instance, and the World Trade Organization, Internet Society and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in the second. The ITU-hosted World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003–2025 and subsequent meetings (WSIS +5, +10, +15, and now +20) encapsulates multilateral institutional time. Its successor, the UN hosted Internet Governance Forum, from 2006 to present day, inaugurated multistakeholder consultative time. Human rights campaigns in internet governance spaces on the one hand and, on the other, their ‘digital rights’ equivalent in the hype around blockchains and ensuing Bitcoin ‘gold rushes’ are key episodes, adding their own vernaculars (jargon, acronyms), myths of origins, and agenda-setting rhetoric.

It is our contention that the main tenor of scholarship focusing on these spaces and processes takes an uncritical stance to the ontological dichotomy drawn between states and markets. This dualism delineates Marxian from (neo)liberal schools of thought in international relations, media and communications, international political economy, and economics. A lack of debate on just this line of demarcation – and other dualisms such as those between states and civil society, civil society and corporate interests – belies ambitions to have research findings ‘make a difference’ in policymaking spaces. ² The flip side does no better: explorations of internet/technology agenda-setting privilege the role of Big Tech, either as proxy for a (morally bankrupt) Westphalian state system or the antidote when regulators fail. The now-ism of too much contemporary research lacks awareness of how the big business of today's communications infrastructures and transmissions architectures are part and parcel of yesterday's: from the former British Empire that put in place the submarine cables of telephone and telegraph to the military and cultural hegemony of American power and its patrolling of satellite communications and digital patents. This yesterday is part of the future; from imperial telecom monopolies to personal computing and rise of the internet/web, to would-be platform power and, lately, the megalomania of those ‘harnessing’ commercial and militarized Generative artificial intelligence (AI) for ‘the greater good’. In this historiography, we signal lacunae along three thematic lines:

Historical conflations: The study of Big Tech can be regarded as a sub-set of internet governance research schools and a separate field, identified as ‘tech governance’. ³ For researchers, both domains have become characterized through their close ties with and ‘exclusive’ access to key players: tech companies offer information on the latest design prototypes and ‘high-level’ meetings offer close-ups of, if not participation in (inter)governmental policymaking in real time. ⁴ The so-called multistakeholder participatory model and concomitant research literature is focused on pros and cons of including literally anyone in once closed-club meetings for state and business delegations and affiliated ‘tech communities’. The emerging literature on data/digital sovereignty and data/digital colonialism goes some way in addressing the ethnocentricity of this participatory model, drawing on long-standing critiques of the Westphalian state system positioned as the paragon of ‘good governance’ and human rights standards, a pole position gained on the back of Empire and Slavery (Butt and Franklin, 2026–in press; Nothias, 2025).

The de-politicizing of public–private partnerships: A cursory look at two major UN undertakings this century, the Millennium Development Goals (UN, 2000) and the Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015), provides a sense of the extent to which technical fix-its delivered by private-sector brokers are made pivotal for ambitious agendas to combat, if not end global poverty. In UN discourse – meeting transcripts and formal outcomes – we see information and communication technologies (ICTs) cede bandwidth to The Internet (capitalized). The Sustainable Development Goals expanded the agenda for providing internet ‘access for all’ and positioned tech companies as strategic partners. Silicon Valley and subsidiary companies go where governments now fear to tread ⁵ ; evidenced in rhetoric linking private provision of internet access, digitalized identities included, to global well-being (Ali, 2024; UN, 2021). Tech oligarchies are relied upon to ‘self-regulate’ in European Union (EU) directives and national legislation aiming at addressing the ever-expanding spectrum of ‘online harms’. While court rulings highlight the exception to the rule, business as usual persists as Big Tech continues to command more revenue than many Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. These revenues often stem from large contracts granted by politicians whose campaigns for office are funded in increasing part by the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). ⁶

Techno-solutionism: As Morozov (2013) argues, it is a standard practice to foreground technology as a solution to the problems of tech monopolies: in scholarly literature, policy-papers, and UN resolutions. The converse is also present; the headlining of ‘tech bros behaving badly’ underscores the technocentrism of advocates and critics alike; ‘technology’ becomes reified and de-historicized. When contemplating the sheer market scope and pervasiveness of Big Tech goods and services today, too much scholarship stays at this meta-level of critique, ditching finer-grained mid-range or meso-level analytical frameworks based on longitudinal observation-participation. ⁷ The sweep of studies of surveillance capitalism, digital colonialism, or digital capitalism in recent years in staking their claims for ‘newness’ (Mejias and Couldry, 2024; Zuboff, 2019) have disconnected from empirically grounded theorizations that have stood the test of hi-tech timelines (Mattelart, 1994; Schiller, 1999).

This is a tech-fetish with a positive and a negative magnetic force. It undergirds the aforementioned blind spots about how best to study, if not tackle the breadth and depth of Big Tech's reach: anti-trust break-ups of firms stagger in the face of out-of-court settlements (e.g. Microsoft and then Google), the ‘opening’ up of the source-codes in software design and application layers falters in the face of copyright and national security (F/OSS and Linux are a thing of the past for local authorities and universities). Meanwhile, various forms of digital, and now AI ‘literacy’ programmes flourish (Teachout, 2020) while commercial and militarized ‘innovation’ steam-rolls on at ever grander scales, such as the likes of Facebook's Free Basics emphasizing ‘inclusion’ across India and Africa (Nothias, 2020). The underlying techno centrism remains unchallenged. ⁸

Introducing polycentric internet governmentality

What alternative conceptualizations can address these lacunae, provide openings for more nuanced conceptual and methodological considerations of the ‘rise of Big Tech’? The state of play has not come out of nowhere. What has become more apparent, however, is the status being awarded to venture capital as an accredited political actor. We are witnessing the legitimation of Big Tech–Big State as an authoritative powerbroker, operating alongside the usual democratic and legal checks and balances.

The term ‘governance’, working as an ahistorical and generic descriptor at the macro-level of analysis, no longer suffices. For this reason, a number of internet-age theorizations of perceived changes states’ role have produced terms such as Meta-Power (Singh, 2013), Meta-Governance (Aguerre, in press), and Platform Power (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Others consider the Big Tech–Big State dyad through the lens of critical Marxian and feminist theories (Haraway, 1990, 1997; McCarthy, 2015; McChesney et al., 1998). Yet others return to (Gramscian and other) conceptualizations of hegemony (Santaniello, 2021; Scholte, 2020) within constructivist takes on the state-technology and society axis of power and resistance.

We wholly agree that states have never been the only ‘key actors’ involved in the design, roll-out, and emerging governance institutions of – and for – the internet, however defined (Eriksson and Giacomello, 2009; Franklin, 2004; Goldsmith and Wu, 2006; Haggart et al., 2021). To recall, dichotomies permeate discussions of the relationship between (internet) technology, society, and politics, between ‘states’ and ‘markets’. Literature on either the power of today's tech oligopolies or the ‘role of the state’ obfuscates how shifts in statecraft along this internet's timeline are also premised on the belief that (computer) science and engineering are value-free enterprises (Braman, 2009; Mueller, 2010). The ‘soft power’ literature (Nye, 2002) and attempts to tie ‘information revolution’ to liberal ‘evolution’ ultimately illustrate the far-from-linear nature of paths that often involve devolution.

Our conceptual framework, based on observation of human/digital rights and financial inclusion-for-all agendas, draws from three schools of thought. First, critical feminist scholars and practice theorists such as Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau (Foucault, 1991 [1978], 2004a, 2004b; Franklin, 2013, 2015; Haraway, 1990, 1997). Second, we draw from globalization and international political economy theories that look to relativize and so nuance the leading role that state actors claim to play at the epicentre of today's media–technology–internet regulatory dilemmas. We position these two approaches at the intersection with a third scholarship that posits world order as a ‘polycentric’ rather than a concentric, multipolar, or bipolar configuration. Theories of ‘global governance’ in this domain look to move away from the state-boundedness of mainstream theory and research in order to better account for the interstices that lie between macro-, meso-, and micro-dynamics of power and influence; following the themes, and cast of characters in an ongoing ‘dance’ in public, private, inter-governmental, multilateral, and ‘cross-sector’ participatory and discursive spaces (Aguerre et al., 2024; Bøås and McNeill, 2004). The more diverse repertoire of political-economic and socio-cultural conceptual complexity that ensues from the melding of this trio of frameworks reveals the dispositions of power at work under the multilateral or multistakeholder mantles of legitimacy and authority.

The practices and domains we now proceed to compare (see the two case studies below) are conceptualized as a constellation of the mutually disciplining techno-economic power-mongering that characterizes twenty-first century polycentric internet governmentality. Our conceptual synthesis encapsulates how disparate agendas, overt and covert agenda-setting, crystallize over time through events, orchestrated and ad hoc consultative meetings, and their variegated outputs (drafts, versions, formal outputs). It is these centres of action and activity, spaces in which ‘communities’ gather to set agendas, take stock, and push back on the official transcript that we have each participated in, observed and chronicled over decades of research. Often (only) in hindsight and with the benefit of personal and professional distance does a return to and retrieval of our collective archives make clear the contours of this generation's Big Tech–Big State stake in polycentric internet governmentality; not to be conflated with references to placeholder rubrics such as ‘global governance’ or ‘internet governance’. This era's axis of power and influence, one that non-state actors, NGOs, and civil society organizations strive to be taken on board as serious partners, moves within and across multiple sites of consultations and outputs.

Methodological note

A conversation-based approach to archival retrieval was deployed for the purpose of comparing our fieldwork spaces. The insights that emerge from a revisiting of our combined field notes and related literature did not set out to count keywords, deploy software-enabled forms of content/multi-modal, or critical discourse analysis. These data-sorting tools are not excluded from successive research, nor are they a point of critique for this discussion. Partially/fully immersed participant observation over time furnished us with another corpus (observational and public/private records) materializing (as it is re-ordered, re-curated) through the course of conversations. Big Tech–Big State's advocacy alliances emerge through the excavation; evidenced as an accumulation of hit-and-miss experiments, agendas made and re-made, deals and trade-offs across consecutive and successive events that produce, in turn, a plethora of closed (password-protected) and open (public) records, housed in offline and online caches. Combining archival corpora and oral testimony (ours in this case, and those of research subjects in retrospect), we drew inferences from conversations and cross-checks in two respects: (i) from the perspective of ethnographic research practice in the field – through which research archives form and (ii) (online) public record – the official outcomes (‘public archives’) that scholars and investigative journalists data-mine and code, professional librarians and archivists sort and index, internet companies algorithmically trace, track, and make visible through dominant search engines that, in turn, frame and steer public debates and policy agendas.

One key finding from partnering up for this exploration is evidence of the fetishization of the ‘digital’, namely emerging ‘access rights’ in which the ‘digital’ would transcend the ‘human’ under existing and prospective new international law. Such moves thereby render the human subjects of conventional human rights law (Vincent, 2010) as, ipso facto, digital. In the first instance, blockchain spaces forefront the rhetoric of ‘digital financial inclusion’ where provision of ‘access’ – through the internet – becomes positioned as the ‘right of all rights’. In the second, internet governance spaces see the culmination of 25 years of ‘global’ consultations around the Information Society – the internet – at the intersection of UN-led and private-sector instigated spaces in which human rights have been formally recognized. By 2024 the UN Summit of the Future agenda presented its Global Digital Compact endorsing venture capital as the accredited strategic partner; advocates of ‘digital financial inclusion’ mind-meld with adepts of ‘digital human rights’. The official outputs of such meetings, stored online and accessed through digital tools, comprise the public archive.

The genealogy of the above processes and record-keeping constituting Big Tech–Big State powerbroking that we chronicle is rooted in the 1980s early web communities and counter-cultures. It includes public records of state- and corporate-hosted events. The research archives retrieved for this study are part of this historical conjuncture, a period in which the public-funded world-wide-web applications that popularized this internet made it a global medium in the 1990s, to be then re-invented as a corporate project in the wake of the 1999 ‘Dotcom’ crash as ‘Web 2.0’ and into the post-global financial crisis attempts to enact Web 3 since 2015 (Mandiberg, 2012; Spiller, 2002). Like all personal/research archives, ours are necessarily partial and subjective. Collected over years that include employment at multiple academic institutions and hosted on different servers, emails, and databases, our accumulated record of participant observation spans multiple booms and busts in the Internet's evolution, from the turn of the millennium dot-com boom to present day blockchain and crypto-crises.

We now unpack how polycentric internet governmentality has been emerging, by way of the two fieldwork projects: (i) the ‘co-evolution’ of ‘Big Crypto’ and its concomitant blockchain technologies with their promise of ‘universal access’ to credit as a right, and (ii) human rights advocacy in internet governance spaces premised on ‘multistakeholder participatory models’. With the three aforementioned ‘gaps’ as a continuity thread, these re-constructions lay bare the Big Tech–Big State workings of crypto-solutionism in the first instance and, in the second, the subsuming of human rights under digital rights, by happenstance and by design.

Case 1: crypto-crazes and crypto-carnivals

As internet-based digital networks for seemingly all to join, permission-less blockchain technologies harken back to a de-centralized internet – free from state online surveillance. Yet the right of access to blockchain networks involves the ability not only to transact and exchange digital tokens with others in the network, but also to verify and publish records of these transactions on digital ledgers. Building on decades of experimentation with internet-based money, Bitcoin emerged in 2009 as the first blockchain with a ‘crypto-currency’ seeking to counter governmental control of monetary governance via quasi-independent central banks and their big tech/financial services firms. The former has sought to restrict access to credit in order to ensure ‘sound finance’ whereas the latter services swelled into a crescendo on an international networked scale in the 2010s (Polillo, 2011). As the moniker for experiments with money post-global financial crisis 2007–2008, ‘crypto-’ built on the long history of ‘wildcat finance’ and also efforts at widening credit access. Less restricted to (though not entirely beyond) state control, and more limited by persistent gaps in internet penetration that have left large parts of the world still offline, post-2009 crypto-crazes are not only about price fetishization and speculation, as media reports would stress. Expanding credit access to all has been the key ideological catalyst for the ‘digital nomad’ community advocating these services. An emphasis on inclusion has remained prominent in industry meetups, hackathons, and other events as well as corporate advertising and public relations decrying ‘de-banking’ of citizens around the world (Rodima-Taylor and Grimes, 2019; White, 2025). Yet, until the crypto industry-backed re-election of Trump and other ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) candidates in 2024 (White, n.d.), narratives of inclusion were conspicuously absent from both the media's and academia's fixation on crypto-token's ability to serve as money or be exchanged at exorbitant rates for fiat moneys (Chey, 2023). The original crypto-network narratives, from marginalized constituencies shut out of or exploited by ‘sound finance’, have morphed into the ‘new’ reality of large dominant players. These so-called ‘whales’, in finance research parlance, successfully vied for control of the American state in 2024 by backing both Democrats and Republicans. Crypto's formal entry into Big Tech–Big State's political orbit shocked many commentators in 2024. Yet this coming of age had followed directly in the footsteps of earlier prominent efforts by disgraced high-profile figures like Sam Bankman Fried who had donated large amounts to both major American political parties before his conviction in 2024 of fraud and violating campaign-financing rules.

(1) Ahistorical research: Research into techno-monetary experimentation since 2009 has remained largely ahistorical. Economists, computer scientists, and legal scholars fetishize or decry the novelty of the underlying blockchain, largely dismissing the political aspirations of designers and limited number of users concentrated in the Global North. Nevertheless, a body of critical blockchain studies has emerged. Identified as ‘right-wing extremism’ (Golumbia, 2016), Bitcoin became slowly recognized as a technology of governing (Herian, 2019). Other more historically attuned scholarship unpacked the role of the anarchists, utopians, and technologists who created crypto-currency as the sub-title to a detailed pre-history of Bitcoin technology (Brunton, 2020). Although critical blockchain studies challenge the ahistorical and apolitical thrust of inter-disciplinary interest in the technology, there has been a notable absence of critiques of how growing state sovereignty over applications of the technology rapidly unfolded, first in China and then the USA, and the EU along with OECD countries. ⁹

In just over a decade, crypto-crazes became part and parcel of speculative operations in ‘sandboxes’ or state-supervised playgrounds, under surveillance from finance and security regulators who had previously turned a blind eye to these experiments. In this way, crypto and its underlying blockchain technology have become just another regulatory technology, RegTech. Some scholars situate this integration of crypto into the official regulatory remit of OECD countries within earlier ‘crypto-colonialism’ (Herzfeld, 2002; Howson, 2020). Connecting the historical lineages of ‘blockchain imperialism’ (Jutel, 2022) and applications that are concentrated in the Global North with decolonial ambitions (Campbell-Verduyn and Giumelli, 2022) is largely absent from the literature on an industry that now dominates production and trading as well as the circulation of knowledge about the so-called market-moving ‘whales’ (Campbell-Verduyn and de Cristiano, n.d.). In short, the seemingly new and shocking Big Tech–Big State emergence of American government backing of crypto-projects following Trump's re-election in 2024 did not come out of the blue. While few could have predicted that federal and sub-national American states would establish ‘strategic national reserves’ supporting the exchange prices of major digital tokens, a regulatory approach to promoting ‘innovation’ in digital money under the banner of inclusion was over a decade in the making; built on longer-term and wider efforts to promote American financial, monetary, and technological hegemony (Campbell-Verduyn, 2025).

(2) (Re)politicizing public–private partnerships: Critiques of blockchain and crypto governance emerging in ‘public–private partnerships’ at a global scale have been few and far between. The tendency instead has been on zooming in on high-profile, yet ultimately idiosyncratic, cases where for instance Bitcoin was briefly adopted as legal tender: El Salvador between 2021 and 2024 (Vázquez, 2022) or various memecoins with limited wider significance outside of Musk fan favourite dogecoin and Trump's own $Trump coin with their echoes of the Roman Empire. While the ‘cool dictator’ of that Central American country and ‘less cool dictator-for-a-day’ of the much bigger US state have been rightly critiqued for non-transparent and non-accountable aspects of their adoption of crypto-currency, the wider public–private overlapping power dynamics structuring tech governance spaces, distinct from those designated as internet governance spaces, remain far less researched.

Consider how blockchains are advocated as a solution to the worsening climate crisis in UN consultations: at the Conference of Parties (COP), particularly COP24 (2018) in Poland, blockchain/crypto firms were granted centre-stage to display techno-solutionist climate-change ‘hacks’. For all their grandeur, these actors were focusing on incremental improvements in the transparency and inter-operability of fractured markets for carbon credits (Ali, 2024). The organizations (nominally all-inclusive) coordinating such experiments, including the Ottawa-based Climate Coin Coalition, favoured ‘market openness’ and ‘inclusion’ as core operating principles (Campbell-Verduyn, 2024). These, and other ‘crypto-climate’ efforts, are marred by a lack of transparency and accountability. For an industry originating in efforts to rectify and hold to account the power of unelected central bankers, crypto experiments (in green and other forms of finance) have given scant attention to endemic differentials in decision-making power and access.

As always, there are exceptions: participant observation undertaken as part of the expert panel informing the Cardano blockchain's drafting of a constitution over 2023–2024, which was approved by community delegations in Buenos Aires and Nairobi in late 2024 (Nicolas, 2024), reveals how even the good intentions of academically inclined technologists to be more globally inclusive still fail to overcome insider dynamics in fast-evolving, expert-led ‘inclusive’ projects. Barriers to participation, whether due to time and/or financial resources, leave claims of openness to ring hollow. Core developers and project-leads steer from the top-down, literally from the Cardano Foundation headquarters in the crypto-valley of Zug Switzerland; what are well-meant efforts to foster accountability from the bottom-up. Temporal constraints figure prominently in the difficulty to become transparent in real-time systems, with connectivity differences and time-zone differences perpetuating imbalances in a world clock embedded in the language and zero-meridian of the British Empire. These and other structural power inequalities go unaccounted for in either critical literature or the most inclusive and transparent projects, such as ‘green’ and inclusive blockchains like Cardano (John, 2024).

(3) Techno-determinist fetishes: For the insiders, there is a consensus around ever-more sophisticated technological solutions being the only way to overcome global problems. Just as more extreme and unbridled capitalism was the solution Bitcoin generally provided to the crisis of global capitalism in 2007–2008 (Nakamoto and Bitcoin, 2008), technological tinkering is a typical go-to solution for the problems afflicting Big Crypto. The ‘rough consensus’ about who ‘controls crypto’ tends to encourage a widening of participation by other ‘stakeholders’ either through fintech education/literacy and/or successive ‘everyday apps’. The solutions that are proffered stress digital/tech, or financial ‘literacy’, thereby limiting blockchain studies to discussions of said literacy as ‘inclusion’. ¹⁰ Part of the scholarly issue is the funding of knowledge production in ‘the space’, as the crypto-industry calls its increasingly expansive realm of activity. Blockchain projects offer a plethora of funding, yet distributing organizations have little appetite for deeper theoretical engagement, beyond what can improve the tech through ‘problem-solving’ criticism thereof. Gendered critiques of the lack of non-male participation and inclusion in ‘the space’ did, for instance, prompt ‘crypto-chicks’ campaigns. Critiques of nominally global networks’ concentration in the Global North led to a flurry of ‘inclusion’ industry efforts targeting Africa in particular, often co-sponsored by the OECD and Global North governments and which often materialized through American- and European-based tech firms. The Big Tech–Big State configurations embedding this technology in the Global North and South remain absent from empirical studies. Moreover, research into Big Crypto has developed the tendency to mimic the worst excesses of the industry; the event where scholarship itself was tokenized in non-fungible tokens is just one example. ¹¹

Overall, the inclusion of Big Crypto into Big Tech and morphing of Big Tech into Big Crypto with its close intertwining with Big State is not out of the blue. This coming of age emerged from a longer series of public–private consultations foregrounding ‘digital financial inclusion’ since at least 2014 (Hernandez Sanchez, 2025).

Case 2: expanding rights – are we not human?

The ‘rise of Big Tech’ made so visible at the 2025 presidential inauguration belies the depth of intimacy between (in this case, these hi-tech) global corporations and the US federal government; a relationship that has been a foundational element of US foreign – digital and industrial – policy at all points along this internet's timeline. ‘The “Internet moment”’ (US Department of State, 2012) and its precursor terms of reference are long palpable in US foreign policy discourse (Clinton, 2010; Gore, 1994, 1996). The ‘notes’ for a speech that Gore gave in Buenos Aires in 1994, at the first World Telecommunication Development Conference (WDTC-94) hosted by the ITU have proven to be the preamble to the (US-owned) internet and narrative of origins that has become received wisdom. This speech took place in the very early years of the world-wide web applications (to become synonymous with the ‘internet’ as framed by US voices) is still accessible in the ITU archives (Gore, 1994). The ‘global information infrastructure’ turn of phrase that Gore made his own was reiterated in a version of the speech for the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 2 years later (1996). In the year between these two statements, the phraseology and US-centric vision was articulated in a policy document penned by members of the US Information Infrastructure Taskforce based at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration Agency. It riffs off (perhaps drafted) Gore's sentiments in its presentation of an ‘agenda for cooperation’ the purpose of which was ‘to identify the steps the United States, in concert with other nations, can take to make the vision of the GII [the Global Information Infrastructure, to wit, the “internet”] is a reality’ (Brown et al., 1995). The ITU continues to host annual World Telecommunication Development conferences (the 2025 event was hosted by Azerbaijan).

During another series of ITU-hosted events, the World Summit on the Information Society (2003–2005), precursor civil society campaigns such as the Communications Rights for the Information Society (Hamelink, 1998; Thomas, 2006) were briefly given a new lease of life. Along this ‘tech justice’ advocacy timeline – from the 1970s New World Information and Communication Order demands at the UN, through to the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, the World Summit and then its under-funded and under-rated progeny, the Internet Governance Forum (2006–present day) – human rights (some rights enshrined in law, not all) were to make their entrée at the intersection of international diplomacy, computer engineering, and international internet standards-setting spaces. Calls for ‘human-centred’ priorities in internet R&D and policy agenda-setting gravitated towards the institutional edifice of existing international human rights law and norms (mention of ‘new’ rights was taboo). It was not about re-inventing the wheel but, rather, focusing on getting ‘techies’ and ‘human rights activists’ talking to one another in burgeoning internet governance agenda-setting consultations, evidenced in field notes, official depositions and declarations, recordings and transcripts. This was the first hurdle for human rights advocates in internet governance spaces: even as ‘techies’ could be found on either side of the ‘technology is value-free’ and ‘technology is socially constructed’ fence. ¹² Since then, the second hurdle for civil society and (inter-)governmental representatives has been how to operationalize – further articulate and legitimize – human rights priorities in online spaces, particularly since lawmakers, led by the EU, generate a swathe of tech-led regulations for the Single Digital Market and ‘digital transformation’ agendas premised, in principle, on human rights law.

In short, between 2010 and 2024 in the public record references to ‘human rights and the internet’ were to become a collocation, not an oxymoron. The archives underscore how human rights advocacy, led by an amalgam of NGOs, inter-governmental and would-be ‘multistakeholder’ networks, became more proactive in internet governance spaces. The private sector in tandem with the ‘tech community’ took longer to get on board, beyond paying lip service to fundamental rights and freedoms ‘in principle’ in the official transcript of Internet Governance Forum proceedings: Google in the first instance and the ICANN in the second. But so did major international human rights NGOs. Neither the local chapter memberships of Amnesty nor the management of Human Rights Watch considered internet policymaking and their human rights work as fundamentally connected, at least not until after Snowden's revelations in 2014 (see below). Nor did they attend the Internet Governance Forum until 2014 (8 years since the Internet Governance Forum was inaugurated). Amnesty went on to form a Tech branch, Amnesty Tech. ¹³ Human Rights Watch declared such consultations as a waste of time (Human Rights Watch, 2014) even as their officers in the field deal with abuses of their rights, and those of colleagues, in online spaces.

Nonetheless, evocations of ‘human rights law and norms’ were becoming mainstreamed as a legal and regulatory design principle. ¹⁴ In 2014, the UN passed a second resolution recognizing that human rights exist online as they do offline (UN, 2015). Precursor initiatives date back to 2010/11 through the office of the (then) UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Freedom of Expression, Frank La Rue (2011), advocacy that was developing alongside the inculcation of the OECD-backed ‘Ruggie Principles’ that saw the UN endorsing the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UN HRC, 2011; see Deva, 2012). Despite the pushing and pulling between such initiatives and their respective ‘owners’, human rights, and fundamental freedoms those of Freedom of Expression (Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)) and Privacy (Article 12 of the UDHR) in particular, had ‘arrived’ at the intersection of diplomatic and ‘technical community’ spaces as advocates learned to navigate the respective participatory and consultation models; those working on the principle of ‘rough consensus’ between experts in the second instance and, in the first, diplomatic protocols, ‘soft’ and ‘black letter’ law.

(1) Ahistorical narratives: As pundits watched, blogged, and posted in dismay at Trump and Musk cavorting on stage in January, 2025, the bulk of internet governance scholarship seldom mentions the tech/foreign policy decisions of the two Clinton administrations to lay claim to planetary communications based on computer-to-computer exchanges, as summarized above, notable exceptions notwithstanding (Oppermann, 2018). The ahistorical dimension to human rights advocacy for internet policymaking thereby works in a counter-intuitive way to the techno-fetish and now-ism of crypto spaces. There is almost too much official, institutional history evoked, presented through the prism of the legacy of the UN and post-World War Two (neo)liberal world order. Under international law, individual human rights share the same timeline as the UN itself. ¹⁵

The history-in-the-making tropes that characterize UN- and non-State actor-hosted summits, consultations, and forums dedicated to forging ‘global consensus’ on internet governance is a child of the web, moreover. The definition of internet governance devised by the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG, 2005) still presides, in all its tautological splendour, over not only tech community get-togethers (e.g. ICANN or the Internet Society) and UN-hosted meetings, but also academic conferences. In addition, internet human rights agendas have become algorithmically indexed to precursor, Anglo–European–American civil liberties milestones, from the Magna Carta to the French, and American Revolutions. It is the Magna Carta – a deal struck between the English monarchy and nobility back in 1215 – that has captured the imagination of high-profile figures in the history of internet and world-wide-web technologies. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the ‘fathers of the internet’ along with Vint Cerf (Google's ‘Chief Evangelist’ – his words), funded a policy-capture campaign through his ‘Magna Carta for the Web’.

(2) Public–private power plays: Multistakeholder participatory agendas are characterized by their accessibility protocols, their courting of publicity and verification, legitimation, through participation as a form of transparency. Yet entrenched power hierarchies remain operational: there are no conflict resolution mechanisms in undertakings that now recognize (though do little else) human rights at the online–offline nexus dissent is taboo (Franklin, 2015). The ‘global tech community’ reliance on decision-making based on ‘rough consensus’ (by men, and occasionally women, who consider themselves equals) does not accept liability for any ‘unintentional harms’ on the basis that technology is believed to be value-free. The agglomeration of (un)edited digital archives, performing the virtues of accountability, the tropes of ‘access for all’, and ‘connecting the next billion’ tells only part of the story. In the years since Snowden, the spaces in which human rights law and norms have become officially part of internet governance agenda-setting, have ushered in a new neologism; ‘human rights online’ discourses, resolutions (UN authored), declarations, and charters (cross-sector networks) have started to morph into ‘digital rights’ agendas. There are signs that this rhetorical shimmy goes back to early attempts, in listserv discussions and other caches, to subsume human rights priorities under (corporate) digital rights agenda. ¹⁶ By 2024, we see in the manifest content of the UN's Global Digital Compact the term ‘human rights’ make but one single appearance, at the end of a lead document that is drenched in references to the ‘digital’.

(3) Techno-solutionism masquerading as inclusion: The UN Sustainable Development Goals, which took over from the Millennium Goals in 2015, have put ‘tech’ – internet technologies or ICTs – firmly in the driving seat; SDG Goals 9 and 17 in particular. ¹⁷ All UN-run internet governance-focused consultations now take the SDGs as the starting point, organizational form, and badge of legitimacy. The role of the private sector is secured at all points of this compass, successive Internet Governance Forum meetings, including regional and national spin-offs, taking as themes those that centre the tech. Getting on the programme requires, for old-hands and newbies, confirmed participation from states, tech communities, and corporations. A session proposal, if it even gets on the agenda, would not make sense in this ethos without a technical solution in place. If absent, the session is labelled ‘too civil society’ or, worse, ‘too academic’. Human rights standards in these tech-embedded and indebted settings have faced this disconnect from the outset.

Two, arguably watershed, moments have left their mark around this time–space continuum: first was Edward Snowden's 2014 whistleblowing on the programmes and tools – designed and supplied by Big Tech frontrunners, Microsoft inter alia – under-pinning massive online surveillance by the USA and its international allies in the Five Eyes Alliance (United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Snowden provided evidence of how government security services were resorting not only to extra-judicial but also disproportionate inroads into people's privacy, freedom of association, and freedom of expression online. Snowden's calling of his employer to account paved the way for a significant shift in official positions that the link between internet technologies and human rights are only circumstantial. Second, was the 2019 Christchurch massacre of mosque worshippers by a white supremacist, who live-streamed the shooting using (then) Facebook's live video app. This atrocity led to an unprecedented state-led initiative to clamp down on Big Tech's lax policies of content moderation, and their refusal to accept liability. ¹⁸ The Christchurch Call (2019) that France and New Zealand brokered shortly after the attacks did not go unnoticed by libertarian watchdogs (Mueller and Panday, 2023, York, 2019). In its latest iteration, Big Tech sign-on is a prominent feature (Élysée, 2023).

Once a lightning rod for civil society mobilization and object of disinterest or derision from dedicated followers of techno-determinism, the term – human rights – has become emptied of all critical substance: ‘I challenge anyone to integrate human rights into an internet protocol’ as one keynoter rhetorically asked their audience in 2024. Although now ‘mainstreamed’ in UN-brokered processes and declarations, human rights advocacy remains an unwelcome guest in tech community spaces; ICANN still guards the citadel of an internet premised on computer protocols and operating standards that ‘have nothing to do with human rights’. ¹⁹ The formal evidence, and archival traces, show how human rights in principle still struggle to be taken seriously in the deeper layers of decision-making about internet design and use. Meanwhile, as legal instruments, human rights have acquired a symbolic, ritualistic function in public (re)iterations of rights-based good intentions from internet governance ‘stakeholders’.

What emerges as archives converse with one another

Human rights have failed (Kate Crawford, 24 May 2024, Roundtable at the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI, University of Groningen, The Netherlands).

Poverty denies people any semblance of control over their destiny, it is the ultimate denial of human rights. The accepted human rights are food, shelter, health and education, and the basic responsibility of a society is to make sure that an environment exists so that people can have these things. … So, I say the right to credit should have the topmost priority on the list of human rights (Muhammad Yunus, 2003).

The two quotes above epitomize the junction at which we find ourselves. The Digital (Financial Access) as a Human Right trope encapsulates the ‘capture’ of (human rights) speech (Certeau, 1997) by these dominant forces in spaces designated as multistakeholder and or multilateral. Together and apart, state agencies and businesses own and control the terms of access, use, and participation on the ground (national governments or tech companies as hosts) and online (platforms and service providers).

Two further renditions encapsulate the power (re)dispositions of polycentric internet governmentality. First, tech-fin and/or fin-tech (Zetsche et al., 2017) involves attempts not to enhance human rights but, rather, to frame online finance itself as a right in strategies that follow – not without controversy – from the microcredit movement (Yunus cited above; see Gorshman and Mordoch, 2015). Attempts to position fintech as human rights have been made through ‘multistakeholder’ digital financial inclusion programmes with endorsements from public figures, such as the Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, the World Bank, and Mastercard. The ‘digital turn’ in providing credit access for un(der)banked populations relies on making blockchain technologies synonymous to digitalizing human rights (Al-Saqaf and Seidler, 2017; Hughes, 2017). Even in cases like Kenya's mobile money M-PESA, a successful collaboration between Britain's Vodafone and Kenya's largest operator Safaricom (Bateman et al., 2019), the formative role that fintech provisions may play in enabling the ‘enjoyment of human rights’ remains disputed. The finance rights agenda, now part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Global Digital Compact, has been integral to Empire: British imperialism's justification of ‘poverty finance’ (Bernards, 2022) informs ‘blockchain humanitarianism’ (Connolly et al., 2023; Jutel, 2022) within ‘digital humanitarianism’ (Cheesman, 2023). Second, global digital currency experiments: Libra, a Facebook-led initiative, was a proposed global digital currency consisting of a ‘basket’ of currencies based on the slogan that ‘this time is different’ (Taskinsoy, 2019). It turned out to be no different from earlier e-money attempts to disturb centralized, state monetary authority. Libra was re-dubbed Diem after the US Congress, in defence of the US dollar, succeeded in scuttling the project (Tischer, 2020). Libra-cum-Diem, nominally an inclusive project, was headquartered in Switzerland with (then) Facebook at the centre of the currency's governing association that included Mastercard, Visa, and Uber, alongside tech-devotee countries such as Estonia and non-profits like Women's World Banking. Several large firms dropped out of the project when it began attracting regulatory ire in the USA, EU, and beyond. Yet Diem lives on, through a Californian-based investment bank.

Successive digital currency projects such as the public Central Bank Digital Currencies and private-led ‘proof-of-humanity’ projects like World (Coin) further exemplify Big Tech–Big State collaboration in these sectors (Campbell-Verduyn et al., 2025). The key illusion in these conflations of human rights with digital tools/online access is the promise of inclusion, couched in the marketing as the alternative to state-controlled finance and the silver bullet for ‘sustainable’ development. Learning from the ill-fated Libra experiment, so-called ‘stablecoins’ projects peg digital tokens to fiat currencies, most notably but not solely to the US dollar. In maintaining their fiat pegs, stablecoin issuers boost demand for US dollar assets, reinforcing rather than challenging dollar dominance under the banner of digital financial inclusion. ‘Dollar-pegged stablecoins’, write van’t Klooster et al. (2025) in summarizing a report they submitted to the European Parliament, ‘will be most attractive to citizens of countries with low levels of financial inclusion and unstable currencies […] the US already intends to leverage the strength of its crypto industry as well as its dominance in online commerce and social media (notably through the US big-tech companies)’. Digital financial access reinforces Big Tech–Big State through the advocacy of ‘digital inclusion’ as ‘digital rights’.

Debunking such captured narratives and exposing their contradictions can offer hope that the current constellation and misanthropic values of polycentric internet governmentality is not the only future option. Resistance and viable alternatives can emanate from the kinds of engagement that extensive participant observation on the ground can discover. They can also stem from investigative journalism that, by attending events like the National Conservatism Conference (‘NatCon’, Nguyen, 2025) for example, can throw into relief the deep cracks in the Trump/MAGA–Silicon Valley coalition. Big Tech–Big State has a long, techno-economic and geo-cultural lineage, as these two cases show. But it is not pre-determined to persist.

Conclusion

Our enquiry began from the need to re-consider our conceptual frameworks and empirical data at the sight of the covert power and overt agendas of Big Tech powerholders becoming manifest at Donald Trump's 2025 Presidential re-inauguration. To engage with burgeoning media and scholarly output, academic and multistakeholder meetings heralding, and we quote, the ‘rise of Big Tech’, we exchanged knowledge gained from decades in adjacent research fields. We reconsidered some of our own earlier findings and conceptual lexicon and, in so doing, made three contributions in this study: (i) empirically, we unearthed steady evidence of state–corporate advocacy of ‘rights’ across two distinct research fields and participatory spaces; (ii) conceptually, we show how polycentric internet governmentality better situates the embedding of this Big Tech–Big State power axis across diverse research and policy-spaces and tech-timelines; and (iii), methodologically, we developed a form of knowledge exchange based on archival retrieval and comparison in conversation.

To conclude, we offer four inter-related implications arising from these contributions. The first regards the epistemological politics of research into (internet) governance and ‘rights’ projects: our digital footprints and research data are, ipso facto, mediated by Big Tech service providers. Research archives, field notes and other (audio-visual, photographic, email-based) documentation present themselves in the form of accumulated dossiers in various formats, caches, and publications. Their presence (digital and analogue) is itself under-written by the contours of Big Tech–Big State alliances in keeping public record in United Nations, European Union, and other meetings. This incipient and now complete Big Tech dependency becomes clear in retrospect, away from the day-to-day intensity of close-up participant observation, data- and discourse-tracking, direct interventions in official and preparatory proceedings. Broader questions emerge then concerning the form and practices of archiving in research, and with that the sustainability of terms of access and use when most, if not all research (individual, team, and institutional) data and public record are housed ‘in the cloud’.

This insight leads to a second new avenue of enquiry: What arises when our archives (as digital, virtual artefacts) become inaccessible, if not lost? What might it mean when online forms of empirical evidence can no longer be accessed for corroboration? Different sorts of archival formats and archiving practices are at stake as commercial Big Tech has become commensurate with public knowledge networks. This is far from a new or abstract issue: at least since 9/11 and the US Patriot Act privacy and security concerns have been raised about storing or running digital data through US-based servers based (Kobrin, 2004). More recently is the de-funding of non-commercial scholarly portals and projects, or filtering of those featuring ‘climate change’ and ‘gender’. These trends provide impetus for scholars around the world, not just in the USA, to consider where their research data are located and run through (Baraniuk, 2025): we all need to re-consider our digital archiving practices.

A third, inter-related implication of this study is methodological: our returns and reflections have seen us re-consider the status of ‘the archive’; respect it as a living cultural and research artefact that is as organized as it is haphazard, as filtered as it is managed, as much a product of institutional as it is of ad hoc, temporary actions. Already, researchers have to engage ever-changing access criteria for searching public and private records, and their own research data. Alongside material stored locally on hard drives if not on Big Tech's cloud servers, we include handwritten or typed notes, recorded conversations, and photographs from the field. All become part of archived, and would-be-archived material that scholars, us included, access and (re-)create through bookmarking and downloading internet-dependent (re)sources. Fourth, by revisiting (where still possible) and stepping back into accumulated personal and project research databases (email lists, live transcripts, white papers, drafts, and successive iterations), public resources (e.g. UN agencies, email listservs), and get-togethers (UN forums, ‘tech community’ meetings, industry meet-ups, preparatory meetings online) we discover the benefit of stepping back from the pervasive now-ism of policy and scholarly debates about the internet – tech/AI/media futures. It throws into relief how powerbrokers pit the institutions and protocols of multilateralism against the contemporaneous, ‘all-comers’ ethos of multistakeholderism as incommensurable. In re-considering the fields engaged, and participated in for over 20 years, we observe how ‘rights’ – human, digital, or a combination thereof – undergird de jure Big State collisions and collusions with de facto Big Tech, continually newborn with each techno-hype cycle. Digital inclusion/rights-speak divests the analogue, embodied ‘human’ subject from their ‘rights’, a move through which powerholders re-fashion not only human agency, individual and collective, but also the ‘digital’ into a tool for ‘global consensus’ that is designed to see human rights fail.

Only the combination of multiple – temporal and spatial – scales (Hui, 2020) with multi-sited and mixed method methodologies can formulate ways of observing and chronicling polycentric internet governmentality at work. This entails considering how the steady digitalization and platformization of research fieldwork, which combine online data-gathering and archiving, impact the production and circulation of knowledge in commercially owned and controlled spaces, now part of public–private surveillance arrays at the online–offline nexus. We draw this initial revisiting of our archives to a close with a call for scholarship to delve into, broaden out, and up-scale critiques of the Big Tech–Big State power axis. By this, we mean taking the time and space to scale-back conceits – and institutional pressures – around the role of ‘research impact’ or ‘knowledge valorization’, focusing less on the glamour of Big Tech's consumerist, sleek and shiny operations and related multistakeholderism. We call for fuller consideration of unofficial archives alongside officially operated corporate and civic holdings of what now counts as public knowledge and access. We have illustrated here the modus operandi of well-greased and well-funded advocates claiming to champion an internet/finance ‘for all’ under the wings of a polycentric internet governmentality complex masquerading as digitally inclusive ‘global internet governance’. Human rights advocates and critical scholars need to continually push back on for-profit business models and techno-political agendas claiming that ‘this time it is different’.