Cecilia Rikap

I present a critical analysis of ‘Digital Public Infrastructure’ (DPI). Through the example of India's DPI, also called the India Stack, I argue that the promotion of DPI contributes to the expansion of technological dependence on Big Tech companies’ digital infrastructure, transforming not only citizens but also states into their customers. To understand why such a contradictory policy has become so popular, I trace the origin of the term to Bill Gates and illustrate how his foundation, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and other related institutions describe DPI as foundational digital systems that play a key role in the fulfilment of the UN sustainable development goals and, ultimately, development itself. I situate this discourse within broader narratives that promote technological solutions to structural economic and political hardships, particularly underdevelopment. I then build on Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony and the literature on philanthro-capitalism to deconstruct the meanings of ‘public’ and ‘infrastructure’ promoted by the Gates Foundations and its partnering international organizations. This commentary concludes by underscoring the consequences of the DPI rhetoric for peripheral and semi-peripheral states’ governance.

Modern innovation increasingly emerges not within individual firms but across (digital) business ecosystems, where multiple independent actors co-produce knowledge and value whilst competing over the distribution of innovation rents. This article argues that existing legal frameworks to protect and promote innovation, particularly intellectual property (IP) law and competition law, were designed for a more linear, standalone model of innovation and are poorly suited to the relational, ecosystem-embedded and cumulative nature of contemporary innovative activity. Drawing on innovation economics, business ecosystem theory, competition and IP law, the article advances three interconnected arguments. First, in regimes of 'shared' and 'open' innovation, IP rights should give rise not solely to exclusionary entitlements but also, in appropriate circumstances, to compensation rights calibrated to reflect the contributions of all ecosystem participants. Second, competition law and IP rights should be reconceived as institutional complements rather than antagonists, each reinforcing the conditions for sustained cumulative innovation. Third, and most innovatively, the article proposes the tokenization of IP and data access rights - including data tokens, IP rights tokens, and innovation rent tokens built on blockchain infrastructure - as a concrete legal technology for operationalizing this framework. Tokenization enables fractional ownership of innovation rents, reduces transaction costs in fragmented IP landscapes, facilitates collateralization by ecosystem participants, and converts exclusionary property rules into compensatory liability rules, thereby aligning legal entitlements with the distributed, cumulative reality of shared innovation. The article calls for a differentiated legal architecture that combines exclusivity and compensation according to ecosystem structure, actor position, and innovation stage.

I analyze the relation between what Weiss (2014) dubbed the United States National Security State (US NSS) and US Big Tech focusing on artificial intelligence (AI). I argue that the US NSS was an innovation planner until the 1990s and advance the hypothesis that, amid that vacuum, this millennium has seen the emergence of AI planning by US Big Tech. This has resulted in tensions with the US NSS given the centrality of AI in the military–industrial complex and ultimately for buttressing American primacy, which has always been the US NSS’s main goal. Amid today’s global turbulence, this tension has leaned towards a strategic yet asymmetric alliance that I define as a frenemy relation. Beyond the tit-for-tat between the US NSS and Big Tech companies, their experiences as innovation planners open space for prefiguring an alternative, a democratic way of planning innovation for the common good.

This article uses Mercado Libre, the leading digital platform company in Latin America, as an illustrative case to analyse the effect of regional platforms on development, by considering their interplay with both global leaders and local actors. Building on dependency theory, the article identifies the company's structural dependence on algorithms and computing power provided by the largest information technology (Big Tech) companies in the United States. Nonetheless, it also finds that Mercado Libre is at the frontier in applied data analysis solutions tailored for its businesses. Together with a privileged access to personalized and cross‐fertilized market and financial datasets, the company's internal and purchassed technologies are the source of asymmetric relationships with its platforms’ users. The article conceptualizes Mercado Libre's place in digital capitalism as extractivist with local actors and, just like local elites when dependency theory was first formulated, it is complicit with global powers. But, unlike those elite firms, it is not technologically laggard, and its value capture is underpinned by its technological advantage. Thus, this article conceptualizes (digital) dependency as multiple layers of economic power in which leading firms from the peripheries occupy intermediate and interconnecting positions. It shows that, while these regional leaders operate at the technological frontier, economic power relations based on technological asymmetries remain crucial for studying underdevelopment.

More than a decade has passed since the term “Industry 4.0” was coined in the Hamburg fair in 2011. While some debates on its meaning remain open, a somewhat consensual definition has emerged referring to the digitalization of manufacturing as a convergence between information (or the digital sphere) and production (associated with the idea of a physical sphere). Given that this process is also advancing in other sectors, related terms have emerged such as Agriculture 4.0, Health 4.0 and so o...

Originally published in French as La Finance autoritaire. Vers la fin du néolibéralisme sur le Brexit, Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron’s book was recently translated to English under the title A...

As big tech companies are entering new industrial sectors, an open question concerns the drivers of their expansionary strategies. This paper proposes that these companies are currently entering sectors based on their data-driven intellectual monopoly power, thereby complementing the preliminary answer provided by political economy research which has argued that expansion is driven by their infrastructural power. This approach is developed through a historical analysis of tech giants as companies that systematically turn knowledge and data into intangible assets, showing their expansionary strategies in the healthcare sector to be mainly driven by insights obtained from those intangible assets (a monopolized intangibles driver) and by a quest for conquering new knowledge and data to perpetuate their intellectual monopolies (an intangibles prospecting driver). The paper further illustrates its arguments through a case study of Google’s expansionary strategy and its prioritized incursion into healthcare.

This paper examines the innovation strategy of Siemens, a key player in Europe’s digital economy, by performing network and lexical analyses using data derived from Siemens’s patents and scientific publications since 1998. We observe that the company’s innovation efforts evolved from a broader attempt to develop internal information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities – alongside its historical industrial priorities – to a strategy focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI) for sector-specific and niche applications (such as life and medical sciences). As a result, it became dependent on tech giants’ clouds for accessing more general AI services and digital infrastructure. We build on the intellectual monopoly literature focusing on the effects of tech giants on other leading corporations, to analyse Siemens’s experience. By abandoning the development of general ICT and given the emergence of tech giants as digital economy intellectual monopolies, we show that Siemens is risking its technological autonomy towards these big tech companies. Our results provide clues to understand the challenges faced by Europe and its firms in relation to US and Chinese tech giants.