The Internet era has been marked by the appearance of gigantic ecosystem platforms: search engines, recommendation engines, marketplaces, social networks, collaborative consumption websites, etc. In just a few years, digital platforms have taken an undeniable importance in our daily lives; we have integrated them as a major component of the organization of our interactions through our uses. In doing so, platforms have disrupted the existing social and political paradigms.
The founding promises of the web, openness and collaboration, are gradually being transformed and privatized by hypertrophied Tech platforms. Their business model, based on collecting and processing big data on a large scale (data economy) is by nature oligopolistic, leading to the emergence of Tech gatekeepers (Big Tech, GAFAM) as powerful as States. The numerous side effects in terms of geopolitical reconfiguration, hybrid warfare (information warfare, cyberattacks, cognitive warfare, …), weakening of traditional states’ sovereignty, new forms of public spaces and democratic exercise through private organizations (social media), the necessity of rethinking global regulation and international governance, are raising more and more questions and debates in Europe and the United States.
In short, technology is inherently political, whether that’s the ethics of AI, the regulation of Big Tech, disinformation being spread or cyber becoming a new domain of warfare. Big Tech companies have taken on a major role in geopolitics as the US-China trade war simmers : Tech isn’t just a player in the domestic political process, it’s a geopolitical proxy for nation states as it has been demonstrated during the Ukrainian War.
The underlying geopolitical, political and democratic stakes are thus of a rare intensity: how to qualify these new forms of power? How are they redesigning geopolitical framework ? What are the political and democratic issues at stake and the controversies that are related to them ? What kind of governance can we imagine on a national and international scale? How can we think of economic and political models based on new technologies that are technologically and socially acceptable within the framework of fundamental rights and state of law in the western bloc ?
This course invites students to explore the business models of Big Tech platforms (big data, algorithms, network effects, etc.). We will then analyze the consequences of these new disruptive models and the new economic doctrine they presuppose (market distortion, emergence of monopolies, capture and monetization of personal data, urgent need for regulation, etc.). Then, we will review the political, regulatory and democratic stakes of these new models.
This course is designed as an “awareness toolkit”, an invitation to think together these major contemporary issues.
- Teaching coordinator: Mhalla Asma
- Teaching coordinator: Wanlin Nicolas