2026· National Law School Business Law Review· Vol 12· 0 citations
TL;DR
India’s fragmented regulatory architecture, spanning competition law, intermediary regulation, data governance, and sector-specific controls, produces overlapping and sometimes contradictory legal classifications of Big Tech firms, generating a parallax effect within law itself, enabling both regulatory discretion and strategic compliance by platforms.
Abstract
"This paper examines the role of Big Tech in India through the conceptual lens of parallax, understood as the analytical distortion that arises when platform power is assessed from shifting institutional, legal, and geopolitical vantage points. Existing scholarship and policy debates tend to frame Big Tech in India either through Global North regulatory paradigms emphasizing monopoly power, market foreclosure, and the need for ex-ante constraints or through a domestic developmental narrative that positions digital platforms as engines of innovation, inclusion, and infrastructural expansion. This paper argues that neither perspective, taken in isolation, adequately captures the legal and political economy of platform governance in India.
The paper situates India as a strategic site in the global platform economy, characterized by scale, data intensity, and regulatory experimentation, while also marked by structural dependencies on foreign digital infrastructure. It analyses how India’s fragmented regulatory architecture, spanning competition law, intermediary regulation, data governance, and sector-specific controls, produces overlapping and sometimes contradictory legal classifications of Big Tech firms. These shifting classifications generate a parallax effect within law itself, enabling both regulatory discretion and strategic compliance by platforms.
Focusing on competition law and state-platform relations, the paper shows how formal commitments to market contestability coexist with practical constraints arising from infrastructural reliance and governance trade-offs. Antitrust enforcement, while normatively significant, remains limited in its capacity to address entrenched platform power without disrupting essential digital services. At the same time, the Indian state’s relationship with Big Tech is neither one of capture nor outright resistance, but of negotiated interdependence combining regulation, partnership, and control.
The article critically examines the emergence of technofeudalism within the European Union’s legal framework, drawing on the theoretical contributions of Yanis Varoufakis, Alfred C. Yen, and Katrina Geddes. We argue that the EU’s historically market-oriented regulatory architecture contributed to conditions that facilitated the rise of dominant technology companies exercising quasi-governance functions over digital environments, extracting value from users while evading meaningful democratic accountability. Our analysis distinguishes between two categories of enabling legislation: structural rules, which govern corporate status, taxation, and market consolidation; and action-oriented rules, which regulate platform behavior, algorithmic governance, consumer relations, and data protection. We demonstrate how fragmented national tax regimes, ineffective merger control, under-regulated algorithms, asymmetric consumer protections, unclear liability frameworks for online content, exploitable private international law mechanisms, and inadequately enforced data protection standards collectively reinforce Big Tech’s dominance. While recent regulatory interventions such as the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act represent important steps, they remain embedded in a market-oriented paradigm that insufficiently addresses the broader social, cultural, and democratic implications of platform power. The article concludes by calling for a more coherent, democratically grounded approach to digital regulation—one that moves beyond fragmented, reactive policymaking toward a comprehensive framework capable of strengthening democratic accountability and public oversight within the digital sphere.
T. Ziegler, Thomas Buijnink, Reiner Diederik Duvenage et al.· Laws· 0 citations
The pursuit of digital sovereignty is often presented as a way to reclaim control from powerful technology companies. This blog argues that, in India, this pursuit makes accountability more difficult. India's approach to digital sovereignty is not solely concerned with reasserting state authority over technology companies, but also with reconfiguring the relationship between the state and private actors. In this emerging model, the state plays an enabling role by providing funding, digital infrastructure, and access to scale, while indigenous private technology companies often retain significant operational autonomy and capture much of the resulting value. The blog explores this dynamic across two domains: the increasing reliance on voluntary, industry-led AI governance frameworks in place of binding regulation, and the expanding role of private actors in functions traditionally associated with the state through the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) model. It argues that these developments may blur lines of regulatory responsibility and diffuse accountability across public and private actors, raising questions about how digital sovereignty is being operationalised in practice.
Abstract This article examines the future of the world economy from the standpoint of middle powers, with particular attention to Canada in the wake of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s renewed emphasis on middle-power coordination. It argues that the central economic transformation is not simply digitization, but a deeper pivot from the production of goods and knowledge toward the valuation of data generated through those production processes. Agriculture, manufacturing, health, education, logistics, and public administration are increasingly organized around data capture, platform intermediation, and AI-enabled recombination. This shift intensifies economies of scale, network effects, and economies of scope, thereby concentrating economic power in a small group of multinational technology firms. For middle powers, the resulting challenge is not to reject global platforms, but to avoid operational dependency on them. The article advances digital sovereignty as a framework based on control, interoperability, public-interest data governance, sovereign compute, and contestable digital markets. It concludes that middle powers must develop the state as a platform: a provider of trusted digital foundations that can sustain innovation, democratic accountability, and strategic autonomy in an increasingly platformized world economy.
This study examines the gig economy as a site of contested employment relations, interrogating how algorithmic governance reshapes the social contract between workers and platforms. Drawing on a scoping review of 145 studies, this paper develops a conceptual framework integrating precarious work theory, power dynamics, and employment relations constructs—including worker voice, collective agency, and dispute resolution—to analyse the structural conditions of platform-mediated labour in India. The analysis reveals that algorithmic management operates as a form of digital Taylorism, systematically eroding worker autonomy and bargaining power while reconfiguring the boundaries of the employment relationship. India’s gig workforce, projected to reach 23.5 million by 2029–30, represents a critical case where informality, rapid digitalisation, and weak institutional frameworks converge. The paper argues that addressing these conditions requires a ‘new social contract’ that reconceptualises obligations between platforms, workers, and the state, moving beyond descriptive cataloguing toward theoretically grounded employment relations analysis. Implications are drawn for voice mechanisms, collective bargaining models, and regulatory reform in the Indian context.
Sazzad Parwez· Discover Global Society· 0 citations
The intensifying technological rivalry between the U.S. and China has become one of the central arenas through which contemporary power politics is being reorganized. In the existing literature, this rivalry is often viewed either as a broad contest for technological supremacy or as an early stage of full decoupling. However, this paper advances a more specific claim: the rivalry is producing selective, security-driven fragmentation of technological ecosystems rather than either imminent war or complete technological separation. The argument is developed through a qualitative structured comparison of three issue areas: advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and technical standardization. The selected cases link technological capability to national security, market power, institutional rule-making, and the distribution of international influence. The paper examines Power Transition Theory (PTT) by showing that sector-specific technological leadership cannot be mechanically translated into aggregate national power parity. China’s advances in selected technological domains increase U.S. threat perceptions and intensify the politics of restriction, but they do not by themselves establish the comprehensive parity that PTT identifies as especially dangerous. At the same time, U.S. controls on semiconductors, outbound investment, and sensitive technologies do not amount to full decoupling because both economies remain embedded in dense networks of trade, production, talent, standards, and capital. Therefore, the paper identifies a middle condition: strategic fragmentation. This condition combines continued interdependence in less sensitive areas with tighter controls in domains viewed as militarily, infrastructurally, or politically consequential. The contribution of the paper is to specify the mechanisms through which technology competition reshapes power dynamics, such as weaponized interdependence, alliance coordination, standards competition, and the conversion of technological asymmetries into political leverage. The paper concludes that a contested and uneven order in which states preserve interdependence where it is profitable while fragmenting systems where vulnerability is regarded as strategically unacceptable.
The rapid and pervasive digital transformation of the global economy has fundamentally reshaped markets, presenting unprecedented challenges to traditional antitrust principles and competition law. This paper examines the evolution of competition policy in response to the rise of dominant digital platforms and data-driven business models. It analyzes the inherent characteristics of digital markets, such as multi-sided platforms, strong network effects, the critical role of data, and algorithmic pricing, that strain conventional antitrust frameworks. The research provides a comparative examination of emerging regulatory responses, with a primary focus on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the United Kingdom’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act, and the ongoing enforcement-led approach in the United States. Key research uncovers an international shift towards more proactive, ex-ante regulation to supplement traditional ex-post enforcement. However, significant jurisdictional divergences remain. The paper considers emerging challenges, including generative AI, killer acquisitions, and ensuring data portability and interoperability. It concludes by discussing the effectiveness of current strategies, the inherent balancing acts between supporting innovation and regulating market power, and the vital need for international coordination to ensure a competitive and fair digital ecosystem. This research adds to the academic and policy discourse by synthesizing the current state of digital antitrust. It identifies key trends and outlines a prospective perspective on the future of competition law in a digital world.
Received: 12 March 2026 │ Accepted: 22 June 2026 │ Published: 23 July 2026