China’s evolving stance against tech monopolies: A moment of international alignment in an era of digital sovereignty

Abstract

The digital environment is dominated by monopolistic companies who possess and exercise substantial economic, political and social power to varying degrees. Globally, policymakers are striving to regulate these digital platform companies to address monopoly issues. Through a content analysis of publicly available policy and government documents, company reports, trade press and news media, we investigate key moments in the evolution of anti-monopoly/oligopoly actions taken by the Chinese government against its dominant digital platforms. We then compare this analysis with a brief overview of the European Union's (EU) digital sovereignty agenda, focusing on the discourse regarding greater digital economy competition in the region. Our analysis suggests that in both jurisdictions digital sovereignty is not simply an issue of geopolitics, that is, contests between nation states, but it is also a response to the excessive power wielded by digital platform companies. We argue that in an international digital policy landscape increasingly characterised by digital sovereignty agendas, the issue of monopoly in digital platform economies is a small but potentially overlooked and undervalued point of convergence between the EU and China.