Global digital governance: paradigm shift and an analytical framework

Abstract

Global digital governance has been rising in response to a dual process of globalization and digitalization. Serving the innovation and application of digital technologies, global digital governance requires global cooperation to achieve economic benefits and cope with digital transformation challenges, covering issues, such as the Internet, digital tax, and trans-border data flow. The extant literature fails to answer why these challenges have been getting intense in recent decades and why the global governance responses to them may vary in different ways. This study argues that the transformation from protective immunity of digital platforms to Techlash against big tech triggered the rapid development of global digital governance. Following the paradigm shift argument, the paper further proposes an integrated framework to analyze the characteristics of the new model to explain the heterogeneity across global digital governance issues. The major constituent elements of this framework include the nature of the global commons (comedy or tragedy), global power structure (decentralized or centralized), and the governance regime (technocracy or democracy). This study applies the framework to analyze three cases of global digital governance issues and demonstrates its analytical power.