Fifteen years ago in All Politics is Global, I developed a typological theory of global economic governance, arguing that globalization had not transformed international relations but merely expanded the arenas of contestation to include policy arenas that had previously been the exclusive province of domestic politics. In my model, what truly mattered to global governance was the distribution of preferences among the great powers. When great power coordination was achieved, then effective governance would be the outcome. When great power coordination was not, then global governance would exist in name only. Demands for greater content moderation across platforms have increased as the modern economy has become increasingly data-driven. Can any standards be negotiated at the global level? The likeliest result will be a hypocritical system of “sham governance.” Under this system, a few token agreements might be negotiated at the global level. Even these arrangements, however, will lack enforcement mechanisms and likely be honored only in the breach. The regulatory center of gravity will remain at the national level. Changes at the societal and global levels over the past fifteen years only reinforce the dynamics that lead to such an outcome.

In a world of weaponized interdependence, middle powers have policy choices that can enhance their autonomy. However, having this policy space is not enough. In order to turn the policy space into policy enactment, domestic politics has to align in a particular way. This chapter considers India and Brazil as examples of “middle powers” and analyzes their capacity to enact autonomy and safeguard their digital sovereignty. The authors argue that when independent institutions’ interests are incorporated into the policymaking process and are not usurped by the parliamentary (political) process, they observe the enactment of autonomy-enhancing policies. Brazil’s and India’s data localization policies are illustrative case studies. While Brazil and India are both open democracies with a technoeconomic landscapes characterized by a similar technoeconomic landscape with a hybrid mixture of foreign-owned and domestically owned companies, they have adopted different data localization policies. The authors argue that the divergent paths of Brazil and India are due to the nature of the policymaking process. India’s policymaking incorporated the interests of independent institutions. In contrast, Brazil’s parliamentary process usurped policymaking power from its independent institutions and has not yet granted the mandate and tools to either existing or necessary new institutions, such as regulatory agencies, to address this emerging and already pressing set of issues. Thus, for countries to enact policies to enhance their digital sovereignty, the interests of independent institutions must be incorporated, and their power must be increased.

The question of how to balance free data flows and national policy objectives, especially data privacy and security, is key to advancing the benefits of the digital economy. After establishing that new digital technologies have further integrated physical and digital activities, and thus, more and more of our social interactions are being sensed and datafied, Chapter 6 argues that innovative regulatory approaches are needed to respond to the impact of big data analytics on existing privacy and cybersecurity regimes. At the crossroads, where multistakeholderism meets multilateralism, the roles of the public and private sectors should be reconfigured for a datafied world. Looking to the future, rapid technological developments and market changes call for further public–private convergence in data governance, allowing both public authorities and private actors to jointly reshape the norms of cross-border data flows. Under such an umbrella, the appropriate role of multilateral, state-based norm-setting in Internet governance includes the oversight of the balance between the free flow of data and other legitimate public policies, as well as engagement in the coordination of international standards.

Much has changed since CompuServe introduced its “Electronic Mall” as the first major retail e-commerce platform in 1984. Digital technologies have driven down costs and improved access and opportunities for producers and consumers, manufacturers and farmers, and above all, users. Digital technologies have transformed how a large part of the global economy operates. A broad range of goods are now digital and thereby intangible, being made up of bytes. Likewise, many services that previously required costly face-to-face contact between the firm and consumer are now available remotely.

Technology has opened international trade – in the form of e-commerce – to a broad range of firms and sectors that beforehand would have been the sole domain of larger multinational companies. Most importantly, technology and the Internet reduced the transaction costs and information asymmetries associated with international trade. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter and search engines like Google and Bing give large and small businesses alike easy ways to advertise services to people around the world.

Since the issuance of a joint statement in January 2019, seventy-eight World Trade Organization (WTO) members have confirmed their intention to commence WTO negotiations on trade-related aspects of electronic commerce. There is a growing expectation that a new agreement on trade-related aspects of electronic commerce (TREC Agreement) will be adopted in the not-so-distant future. One key question that has been left out in the process of negotiating the TREC Agreement is how disputes concerning electronic commerce should be settled. This chapter points out that digital trade disputes arising under the proposed TREC Agreement will likely differ from conventional trade disputes arising under the WTO agreements in terms of the diversity of stakeholders and the nature of the balance between trade and non-trade values and that the rules and procedures of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) may not properly apply to the former. It argues that special or additional dispute settlement rules and procedures should be incorporated into the TREC Agreement to fill those gaps in the existing DSU with regard to the handling of digital trade disputes.

This chapter surveys a number of regulatory interventions through which governments seek to enhance domestic companies’ access to data: mandatory data sharing requirements (as under the EU’s new financial services regulations), data transfer restrictions (as under India’s draft ecommerce policy), and open data initiatives (as under Singapore’s ‘smart nation’ initiative) – all seek to make more data available with the aim of spurring innovation and growth in the AI economy. Such measures are indirectly affected by existing and newly emerging rules of international economic law. International investment law is likely to be mobilized in defense against governments that seek to mandate data sharing from private data holders, while new rules on “digital trade” are meant to ensure transnational data mobility. In sum, international economic law regulates data in favor of data-holders’ ability to retain control over data location and use and constrains states’ ability to confront asymmetric control over data.

Cross-border data flows are raising both economic and political concerns related to the concentration of data, data sovereignty, privacy, law enforcement, and national security. This has posed the question of whether countries should insist that companies process data within their jurisdictions and many countries have already enacted restrictions on the transfer of data across borders. However, it is yet not clear how different types of data policies impact trade. The chapter addresses the question by looking at whether data policies create a distortion on trade in services and explores the direct and indirect costs of data protectionism.