Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology. By Anu Bradford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 599. Index.

There is a strong case to be made that the Internet is the most transformative technology of the last half century. The early Internet was admittedly tiny and inauspicious. The first message, sent in October 1969, from UCLA to Stanford, barely arrived.¹ But in the almost fifty-five years since, the Internet has evolved from a small, largely scientific and military enterprise based entirely within the United States to a truly globe-spanning network of networks that touches virtually every aspect of life in nearly every nation on earth. The many billions of users worldwide are a testament to that dramatic transformation. Indeed, access to the digital world has for many become as essential as shelter.² As of last year, there are more mobile phones than people in the world.³

Lawyers, social scientists, and policy analysts have long tried to assess how digital technologies are altering our world. Yet there is still much to be understood about how the digital domain impacts international affairs. This is particularly true with regard to international law. From the role of Facebook in fomenting ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya in Myanmar,⁴ to the ongoing “chip war”⁵ that places Taiwan, already a central flashpoint in Asian security debates, at the center of the most dynamic sector of the global economy, to China's export of its increasingly powerful facial recognition and surveillance systems,⁶ digital technologies are reshaping the global order in profound and often disturbing ways. Technology has traditionally been analyzed as a largely economic or trade issue. Yet increasingly technological change and dominance are viewed through the prism of national security and even human rights.⁷ All this makes understanding the trajectory of the digital domain in the twenty-first century crucial and timely.

While there are many ways to analyze these developments, an increasingly popular and arresting prism is through the lens of national or regional competition. Viewed in geopolitical terms, with the digital domain the newest arena for state contestation, it is easy—perhaps too easy—to simply graft prior thinking about power politics and the rise and fall of nations to the realm of high technology. Digital technologies nonetheless have some unique characteristics. For one, an unusually large fraction of the most important elements is in private hands.⁸ Firms such as Apple, Alphabet, and Alibaba are among the most powerful on Earth (and those are just the As.) As a result, they play an absolutely central role in the governance of technology. Two, unlike the oceans, or space, or even the “heartlands” and “rimlands” of a century ago,⁹ the digital domain was created, not found. And even more striking, in large part it was created in one nation: the United States.

To be sure, the United States has a leading role in many arenas of cooperation and conflict. But for technology this role is especially notable. Indeed, some have called the Internet, not incorrectly, “America's gift to the world.”¹⁰ While proto computers can be traced to Britain, Germany, and elsewhere, the first major supercomputers were born at IBM. The Department of Defense was a key player in the creation of the Internet.¹¹ The first mobile phone call was made in New York City, on a Motorola device. More recently, American technology firms—from Microsoft to Meta—have consistently been among the largest and most influential in the world. (And while there are many AI applications, ChatGPT, a product of San Francisco-based Open AI, arguably spurred the current frenzy in artificial intelligence.) In short, most of the essential innovations in the history of digital technology have come from American universities, firms, and inventors. As a result, the United States has long been the most powerful voice over questions of the rules of the digital road.

Yet as Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, by Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School, explains, as digital technologies have proliferated and globalized two serious rivals to American primacy over high technology have arisen. The first is China. Once derided for even attempting to control the Internet—in 2000, Bill Clinton called the effort akin to “trying to nail Jello to the wall”—China has proven very adept at deploying digital tools for political and economic purposes.¹² Long focused on reining in the Internet's impressive social and political influence, China has in recent years developed its own unique and quite powerful digital ecosystem. While much of China's focus is on the use of technology to shape and even repress domestic society, apps such as WeChat and TikTok, and firms such as Huawei, are increasingly built for export. And as AI looms as the next huge technological innovation, China, some argue, is poised to take on an even more central role.¹³

The second rival is Europe. Collectively the world's second largest economy, Europe is also establishing itself as an alternative digital power center. Europe's technology firms are admittedly small, though some, such as Finland's Nokia, played an outsized role in earlier years.¹⁴ Europe's contributions to technological innovation have also been generally minor, and Europe had some unfortunate early misfires, such as France's Minitel system, which, while innovative and popular for over two decades, represents a sort of evolutionary dead-end on the way to the global Internet. As Digital Empires details, however, Europe's contemporary reach and power over the regulation of technology is large and growing. Perhaps the most well-known example is the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). (Among other effects, GDPR has led to the recent explosion of questions about “cookie preferences” on nearly every website.)¹⁵ The legislation is but one of many instances in which Europe's huge market and well-developed administrative apparatus have begun to reshape digital markets globally, and, as a result, the all-important relationship between each of us and our devices.

Which of these three leading polities--the United States, China, and Europe—will prove most influential over our digital future is the central question Digital Empires raises.¹⁶ There is a strong argument that each will prove influential in its own way, reshaping rules and markets of greatest interest and ceding—or losing—control of other aspects to other actors as technologies and their uses evolve. But there are darker scenarios. Perhaps, although it was steeped in a libertarian and at times even communitarian spirt in the early years, the Internet will ultimately evolve to be primarily a tool of state repression and corporate control.¹⁷ Or, less Orwell and more Huxley, our quickening addiction to digital technologies may simply enable us, more and more, to “amuse ourselves to death.”¹⁸ And maybe the Internet as we know it is simply doomed, destined to splinter into three (or more) distinct regional internets, connected in some basic ways but fundamentally separate.¹⁹

Digital Empires is a timely, important intervention in these inquiries. Bradford provides an extensive taxonomy and guide to the burgeoning debate over which model will ultimately prevail in this critical new arena of geopolitical competition. Clocking in at 600 pages and carefully and thoughtfully researched, it offers a detailed accounting of the evolution but also the strengths and weaknesses of China, the United States, and the EU as they struggle to control the digital future. “Not unlike the empires of the past,” Bradford writes, these digital empires have “exported their domestic models in an effort to expand their respective spheres of influence . . . [t]oday's digital empires are primarily exporting their tech companies, technologies, and rules governing those technologies, thus shaping countries and individuals that fall under their influence toward the norms and values they espouse” (p. 6). This fight for global dominance, which she sometimes terms the “horizontal battle,” is the central story of the book. (This struggle also has what Bradford calls a vertical counterpart. This occurs between firms and governments within a given empire, reflecting the fact that so much power over technology is privately held.) The three-way struggle for global primacy that the book focuses on, however—the horizontal dimension—is a very specific one. It is not primacy over the development of the most successful technologies of the future. Nor is it the domination of the markets in those technologies. Rather, as the subtitle makes clear, it is a battle over the regulation of those technologies.

Digital Empires describes the leading, though perhaps fading, American digital empire as embodying a “market-driven regulatory model” (p. 7). The origins of that model can be traced to California: “not only the home of pathbreaking technological innovations, but also certain countercultural ideals that shaped the internet revolution and championed internet freedom” (p. 33).²⁰ As the geographic home of the Internet and the site of the most powerful contemporary technology firms, Silicon Valley's unique, open ethos has long suffused the digital domain and, not unrelatedly, propelled forward American interests—and profits. For shorthand, Bradford sometimes refers to this model as “American private power” (p. 20).

China, by contrast, has a “state-driven regulatory model.” This approach “seeks to harness technology in strengthening government control as opposed to protecting individual freedom” (p. 69). A relative late comer to high technology, China adapted many aspects of the digital domain to new and unforeseen purposes, and, surprising many early observers, showed that governments can exert enormous control over dispersed technology platforms. China has also aggressively marketed its technological approaches abroad, leading Bradford to summarize China's chief attribute as “infrastructure power” (p. 20).

The EU approach is distinct from both the Chinese and American models. Neither a hotbed of permissive and freewheeling innovation—perhaps wreaking widespread harm as it “moves fast and breaks things”²¹—nor a sinister system of control that, like a slow-moving python, simply and inevitably smothers its prey, the EU's approach is less focused on technology per se than on its regulation and control. The EU approach, as Digital Empires describes it, rests on three core pillars: fundamental rights, democracy, and fairness. Aiming to rein in the worst excesses of both the American and Chinese empires, even as it sometimes lumbers clunkily, the EU plays a key role in moderating the trajectory of technological evolution and moving it, through the power of law, toward a more humane future. Europe's is primarily a “regulatory power” (id.).

Bradford's previous book was the influential The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the Word.²² Building off the earlier concept of a “California Effect” in regulation, in that work she impressively cataloged the many ways in which the EU has played an outsized and generally salutary role in shaping the rules that regulate a wide array of products and services in global trade.²³ Bradford is, in short, a champion of the EU. Perhaps as a result, she strives in Digital Empires to portray Europe as an equal of China and America in the three-way struggle for dominance, even as she accurately highlights its limitations. Indeed, to some degree distilling down the attributes of the three leading digital empires as “private power,” “regulatory power,” and “infrastructure power” can make the deck seemed stacked in a book whose avowed focus is “the global battle to regulate technology.”

Still, there is no question that the EU is becoming a very important player in the regulation of all things digital. Bradford rightly argues that the libertarian ethos of the American “Internet freedom agenda” is waning.²⁴ Consumer concerns over privacy, while admittedly ebbing and flowing, are moving ever closer to the EU's model. Even the U.S. Congress is increasingly hostile to Silicon Valley and its mega-firms. The Valley was a place that, until recently, devoted surprisingly little time and attention to Beltway politics, and for the most part Congress simply fawned over the tech industry in return. Those days are now over. But it is harder to say whether it is correct that “the US is losing the horizontal battle to China and the EU” (p. 360) or perhaps more pointedly, whether that is the battle that really matters the most. While the EU has certainly blazed significant trails regarding digital regulation, some see the European approach as largely a way to hobble the more innovative and dominant American firms.²⁵ And it is not impossible for the United States to follow Europe's lead in regulation, if it chooses to. Today the United States is a much larger economy than Europe²⁶ (strikingly in comparison to a decade ago.) Moreover, it is one that is traditionally not shy about imposing its parochial economic and legal preferences on others. Washington, DC is certainly stymied by partisanship in many areas and thus often gridlocked. And the First Amendment creates significant barriers to certain forms of legislation, especially with regard to social media platforms. Yet Congress can still pass laws on occasion and, if it chooses to, dramatically reshape markets around the globe. By contrast, for Europe to approach the United States in technological innovation, in the dominant role of its firms, and as a hub for inventive talent will require quite major shifts in a number of disparate and difficult areas.²⁷ As Bradford explains, America's incredible penchant for innovation and its hugely successful firms are the product not only of high rates of immigration (most major American tech company founders are immigrants);²⁸ it also rests on flexible bankruptcy laws, which promote risk-taking and allow for second chances; vibrant and dynamic universities, which are rarely matched on the continent; and a deep network of venture capital firms ready and able to invest large sums in very notional companies, all in the hopes of massive gains down the road.²⁹ This unusual confluence has, as every Silicon-X manque’ attempt to date has illustrated, proven almost impossible to replicate.

While Digital Empires at times suggests that the United States is losing the big battle to China and Europe, the book also offers a very different pairing. As Bradford argues toward the conclusion, it is perhaps more accurate to describe not a tripartite war but instead an emerging two-way conflict, in which China vies for supremacy against a somewhat united West. She terms this a struggle between “techno-democracies and techno-autocracies.” And despite its two-on-one nature, it is one in which China, with its powerful state control, “has certain advantages” (p. 391). These advantages, she claims, include greater ability to swiftly promulgate and enforce regulations; burgeoning success at exporting its digital model; and the development of a surprisingly successful set of technology firms. As Bradford puts it with regard to other states around the globe, “techno-democracies therefore have a hard time arguing that by emulating China's state-driven regulatory model, countries would compromise their digital development. Instead, by looking at the Chinese model, some of these governments see the best of both worlds: effective political control and impressive economic success” (p. 392).

Is China as a result poised to win the all-important horizontal battle for dominance? China's success in digital technology is undeniably impressive. (And Bill Clinton's early dismissal of its efforts at controlling the Internet should always serve as a cautionary tale.) Still, there are reasons to doubt that the Chinese approach to technology will ultimately prevail. Much as in the Cold War, when some saw advantage in Soviet planning and decisiveness and believed the USSR was on the road to surpassing the United States economically³⁰—a prediction that proved categorically wrong—it may be difficult to assess China's real trajectory over the key technologies of the twenty-first century because so much is masked by the Chinese political system. To be sure, contemporary China is less opaque than the Cold War Soviet Union. On some measures, such as Chinese hardware deployed globally, it is not hard to analyze the trends accurately. Firms such as Huawei are indeed making major inroads abroad, even as American competitors still loom very large globally. But the brief but impactful history of digital technology suggests that it is less today's market share than tomorrow's that really matters. Innovation is the ultimate key to the future, and things that once seemed so important, from Yahoo! to NFTs to the metaverse, can disappear from view surprisingly fast.³¹ On this score, it is less clear that China or its model can prevail. The numerous American advantages that Digital Empires details, such as a tradition of immigration and excellent, open universities—not to mention a general culture that rewards creativity and risk-taking—are still not fully present in China either.³² The United States continues to be the leader in developing new technologies. Even in the 2020s, a half-century into the Internet Age, the biggest innovations in the digital world are still often conceived in California.

At the level of international law, moreover, the emerging democratic axis Digital Empires describes has proven to be fairly effective at pushing back on the efforts by China and other authoritarian states to entrench more sovereign control over digital flows. China has long espoused greater state sway over technology and has viewed “cyber-sovereignty” as a natural extension of its generally sovereigntist approach to global governance.³³ Interestingly, that has sometimes taken the form of seeking a more central role for international organizations such as the International Telecommunications Union. This is because these one-nation-one-vote settings dilute the overweening power of the United States. Within the confines of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), or even the UN itself, China can more readily organize and rally the wide array of states who fear American (and European) dominance of the digital world and would prefer to gain more state power over this all important set of technologies. The West, by contrast, has generally fought to keep traditional international organizations out of the digital domain, for many of the same reasons. The United States in particular has long preferred the status quo mix of private and public entities involved in the governance of the Internet—in essence, arguing that the ITU, despite having “telecommunication” in its name, is the wrong body to control the world's leading platform of connection. Sometimes couched as a battle between multistakeholder and multilateral approaches,³⁴ this clash over governance models reached a peak at the World Conference on International Telecommunications a decade ago and continues today. The support for multistakeholderism by the United States and its allies in global forums reflects the fact that the dominant role of American technology firms, specialist non-governmental organizations, and universities in all things digital means that the benign-sounding multistakeholder approach is actually very much in the U.S. interest.³⁵ Indeed, this is a major reason the U.S. government ultimately gave up control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a key player in Internet governance that long operated under contract from the U.S. Department of Commerce.³⁶

Of course, there is much more to the global competition over technology than the Internet and the ITU, and Digital Empires rightly takes a broad view of both the empires and their interests. It is most concerned with the biggest picture: who will control the future of technology? The leading innovations and applications of the next decade, let alone the next half-century, are still emerging, and may include things few are even aware of today. (The book's writing largely preceded the recent leap forward in the evolution of AI, but it is helpfully studded with discussion of this perhaps world-changing—or even world-ending—new technological advance.)³⁷

In the end, Digital Empires is understandably hesitant to offer much firm prediction about who ultimately will reign supreme in this multi-faceted arena, but it does canvas the possibilities. In her conclusion, Bradford declares dominance by a single model of digital regulation unlikely. Yet a multipolar world “where different regulatory models harmoniously coexist, and where coordination and cooperation surpass existing differences and conflicts among the models,” she proposes, “is equally improbable” (p. 386). Instead the most likely outcome is simply more conflict. Ultimately, as Digital Empires argues, this conflict over the regulation of technology is increasingly embedded within, and viewed as central to, a much larger, more potent, and more frightening ideological conflict: “a contest to crown democracy or autocracy as the defining current geopolitical order” (p. 392).