Description
This study investigates how big tech firms strategically exploit domestic lobbying to achieve transnational policy outcomes, which suggests a strategic triangularization of lobbying strategies. While existing literature has explored big tech’s extensive lobbying activities in the EU and US comprehensively, less attention is devoted to studying how big tech companies leverage their home-state government to influence foreign regulators on competition and technological governance issues. To explore and conceptualize this phenomenon which is increasingly captured by media in recent years yet lacking scholarly attention, this study applies a mixed-methods approach, including social network analysis of lobbying data and content analysis of internal EU documents related to its discussions with big tech companies, which is complemented by a formal game-theoretical framework for explaining big tech’s incentives to engage in such strategic triangularization and cosine similarity analysis of position papers to explore the convergence of their narratives. It argues that such strategic triangularization is not a new practice but have always been in big tech’s toolkit for bargaining for its interests, but the current geopolitical climate has offered additional opportunities for the companies to latch on state government’s geopolitical favor to advocate deregulations.
