Big tech companies: from digital instrumentarianism to digital authoritarianism

The paper examines how global powers deploy digital expansionism to achieve geopolitical objectives through three mechanisms: data exploitation; control via technological infrastructures; and influence over regulation and governance. It contrasts U.S., Chinese, and EU strategies. The U.S. seeks to maintain global digital, political, and economic supremacy by exporting surveillance capitalism, leveraging large tech firms (GAMAM) to create technological dependence, influencing foreign digital regulations, and curbing Chinese tech expansion. China pursues both digital sovereignty (domestic control through censorship, surveillance, and restrictive data laws) and digital expansionism (notably via the Belt and Road Initiative and tech champions such as Huawei, ZTE, Alibaba, Tencent), promoting a model of digital authoritarianism. The EU prioritizes digital sovereignty through a comprehensive regulatory package to protect fundamental values, harmonize internal markets, and counter U.S. and Chinese expansion, while also projecting regulatory influence beyond its borders.

The discussion engages extensively with prior scholarship on surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), data power asymmetries and data colonialism (Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge, 2022), U.S. and Chinese digital strategies (Lee, 2018; Cave et al., 2019; Kliman et al., 2019; Helberg, 2021; Hillman, 2021), regulatory diffusion (Bradford, 2020, 2023; Scott and Cremona, 2019), and information manipulation and computational propaganda (Howard, 2020; Woolley, 2023). It situates U.S. big tech within a market-driven instrumentarian model and Chinese firms within state-linked authoritarian governance structures, drawing on policy reports, case studies, and regulatory actions to frame how corporate and state actors shape digital ecosystems and democratic processes.

• Digital expansionism operates through data exploitation, technological infrastructure control, and regulatory influence, enabling powerful states to project control beyond borders.
• U.S. strategy emphasizes exporting surveillance capitalism and free-market values by supporting GAMAM’s dominance, pressuring other countries (e.g., India, Indonesia, EU) to relax data regulations, and restricting Chinese tech influence.
• China advances both digital sovereignty and expansionism: domestically via the Great Firewall, social surveillance, and restrictive data laws; internationally through BRI-linked digital infrastructure and major firms (Huawei, ZTE, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance) to propagate digital authoritarianism.
• The EU has developed a layered regulatory framework to protect fundamental rights, ensure market fairness, and increase digital sovereignty; it also projects regulatory power internationally (de jure and de facto regulatory diffusion).
• U.S. big tech firms have faced EU investigations and penalties: Google (GDPR infringements, illegal data transfers, antitrust fines), Meta and Amazon (GDPR and data transfer violations), with Apple and Microsoft under investigation for competition concerns.
• The EU has constrained Chinese influence by vetoing Huawei and ZTE in 5G rollouts and banning TikTok on EU institutional devices, aiming to reduce dependence and CCP leverage.
• Risks to EU democracies include monopolization of platforms/infrastructure, intensified behavioral data extraction, illegal data export to the U.S., unrestricted AI-driven profiling and cross-platform data exploitation, and commercialization of behavior modification (microtargeting, computational propaganda, information intoxication), leading toward a surveillance-democracy.
• Both instrumentarianism (market-driven control by U.S. firms) and digital authoritarianism (state-driven CCP control via Chinese firms) create severe power and knowledge asymmetries that threaten EU sovereignty and democratic integrity.

Findings indicate that U.S. and Chinese digital expansionism exploit platform monopolies, cross-border data flows, and regulatory asymmetries to influence EU societies and politics. Instrumentarian practices monetize behavioral modification, while digital authoritarianism aligns corporate infrastructure with state objectives to export governance norms and control mechanisms. These dynamics undermine EU citizens’ autonomy, erode public opinion formation, and expose electoral processes to manipulation. The EU’s regulatory response (privacy protection, competition enforcement, AI and platform governance, extraterritorial reach) mitigates but does not eliminate systemic risks due to persistent dependencies on non-EU infrastructures, continued data exfiltration, and evolving influence operations.

Strategies of digital instrumentarianism and digital authoritarianism—rooted in monopolization of social learning, behavioral manipulation, and surveillance-democracy—pose significant threats to EU citizens’ freedom and to the functioning and sovereignty of EU democracies. EU digital sovereignty efforts and regulatory measures have reduced some harms but have not eradicated them, given ongoing structural dependencies and deliberate influence mechanisms by U.S. big tech and CCP-aligned Chinese firms. Future work should strengthen EU digital infrastructures, reduce external dependencies, enhance enforcement against unlawful data transfers and anticompetitive conduct, and develop resilient public sphere protections against AI-enabled manipulation.