Article by Diyi Liu and Shashank Mohan: “As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the rules and norms governing technology no longer remain confined to their jurisdictions of origin. Instead, they ripple outward, creating what scholars have labelled national and regional effects that reflect both governance philosophies and geopolitical ambitions. They represent the process of norm externalization—whereby regulations, standards, and governance approaches developed in one jurisdiction influence or are adopted by others, either through market mechanisms, deliberate policy diffusion, or in response to capacity constraints and power asymmetries.
These effects are not merely academic constructs, but powerful forces reshaping the global digital order: They enable mapping pathways of policy transfer across borders, and shed light on how external influences interact with domestic politics in regulatory outcomes. Further, norm externalization characterizes geopolitical influence and economic and technological leverage of exporting countries, and reveals normative alignments between socio-political systems that seek to adopt these governance models.
When the European Union (EU) implements stringent data protection standards through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies worldwide often find it more efficient and cost-effective to apply these standards globally rather than maintain separate systems for each jurisdiction, as witnessed when Microsoft extended GDPR rights to all users worldwide. As China extends its Digital Silk Road (DSR) through infrastructure investments across the Majority World (e.g., the cross-border cable projects), its technological standards and governance approaches could be transferred to recipient countries. Similarly, as India develops and exports its digital public infrastructure (DPI), it exerts influence over other countries in the Majority World to adopt similar population-wide digital welfare schemes that are based on open-standards and operationalize interoperability.
The competition between different regulatory models is particularly consequential for countries in the Majority World, which find themselves navigating competing governance frameworks while attempting to assert their own digital sovereignty…(More)”
