In the column entitled “What If the End of Democracy Does Not Come from the People or the Government? Big Tech and the Capture of the American State”, referenced below, I argued that American Big Tech companies are not merely service providers to the state, but critical infrastructure for it, and that this structural dependence constitutes an unprecedented form of capture, with direct implications for Brazilian sovereignty. The most common reaction to this kind of argument, especially among readers with a background in history, is healthy skepticism: is this really new? The question deserves an honest answer, because not only the diagnosis but also the capacity to act depends on it.

The short answer is: no, and yes. But hold on, let us start from the beginning.

The Past Had Its Big Techs Too

The role of private actors performing functions typically associated with the state is not historically new. The British East India Company governed territories, collected taxes, maintained its own armies, and conducted diplomatic relations in the name of, and at times in defiance of, the British Crown. The Dutch VOC exercised quasi-sovereign powers in parts of Asia. Private banks shaped monetary systems long before any central bank existed. Religious organizations provided social assistance (predating the welfare state), education, and forms of governance for centuries. Private military companies such as Blackwater performed security functions in conflict zones that no state wanted to publicly assume.

If the argument were simply that “private entities sometimes perform state functions”, it would not be particularly innovative. A historian of capitalism could rightly say that the world has always also been built by corporations, and that forgetting this deprives us of analytical tools already developed to understand corporate sovereignty, empire, monopoly power, and transnational authority.

This criticism is legitimate and deserves to be taken seriously. Treating the present as absolutely unprecedented comes at a cost: it obscures important continuities and prevents us from learning from cycles that have already repeated themselves. But if cycles do exist, and should be taken seriously, then what, in fact, has changed?

Scholars Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Tobias Liebetrau argue, and I agree, that the role of Big Tech differs from historical precedents not only in degree, but in kind. Four dimensions help us understand why.

The first is the difference between territory and infrastructure. The East India Companies governed specific places, with geographically defined borders. Big Tech companies govern digital infrastructures used simultaneously by billions of people across different jurisdictions, without any of them having to have “ceded” any territory. Power does not emanate from a territorial concession, but from technical indispensability.

The second is epistemic power. Companies such as Google and Meta do not merely perform functions; they shape how information is found, classified, circulated, and validated. This goes beyond administrative authority: it is the capacity to intervene in the very conditions under which knowledge is produced. As I argued in the aforementioned column, when the state becomes dependent on private algorithms to interpret data, analyze risks, and prioritize decisions, it internalizes a corporate worldview as the basis for public action.

The third is the blurring of the boundaries between public and private. Colonial companies operated under explicit concessions from states; there was a contract, however convoluted it may have been. Big Tech companies cooperate with states, resist them, and compete with them at the same time, often within the same week. This ambiguity makes regulation more difficult because there is no clear relationship of concession or subordination from which public authorities can act.

The fourth is integration into everyday life. Most people interacted only indirectly with the VOC or the Medici Bank, for example. Digital platforms mediate communication, work, social interaction, navigation, purchases, and access to information for half of humanity on a daily basis. This creates a diffuse, dispersed, and almost invisible form of dependence, something much harder to politicize than, for example, a port controlled by a foreign company.

The most honest conclusion, it seems to me, is therefore a middle-ground position: Big Tech is neither radically unprecedented nor simply more of the same. It is a contemporary form of a very old phenomenon, private actors participating in the construction of political order, yet with a configuration sufficiently new to require its own analytical attention.

Accepting this middle ground has practical consequences. The real problem is not that we do not know how to name what is happening, but rather that the tools we have for responding were designed for a different world. Antitrust law was conceived to regulate markets for physical goods, where the concentration of power is measured in market shares and consumer prices. Applying it to platforms whose logic is one of monopolies over attention, data, and cognitive infrastructure is like trying to regulate a nuclear power plant with the building code for a residential building. It is not necessarily useless. The instruments were simply calibrated for a different problem.

Westphalian sovereignty presupposes that threats come from outside, from other states. It has no categories for actors that operate simultaneously within multiple borders, without armies but with satellites, without declarations of war but with control over critical infrastructures.

There is a concept in political theory that I call here political imagination, adapting what Charles Taylor (2004) designates as the social imaginary: the set of categories, metaphors, and conceptual schemas through which a society thinks about power, legitimacy, and collective action. This imaginary is not neutral: it defines what seems possible and what seems unthinkable, what deserves regulation and what escapes it, who can be held responsible and who operates above accountability.

The dominant political imagination is still, to a large extent, that of the twentieth century: nation-states as central actors, markets as spaces that can be regulated through legal rules, citizens as holders of rights vis-à-vis an identifiable state. This imaginary is now insufficient. It does not capture sovereignty without territory, power without concession, governance without government, or at least not adequately.

The concrete risk is this: we continue to respond to twenty-first-century questions with twentieth-century answers. We regulate platforms as if they were telecommunications companies, always lagging behind the continuous innovations taking place in these spaces. We treat dependence on cloud infrastructure as if it were a matter of procurement. We debate artificial intelligence as if it were simply another technology to be incorporated into the existing state apparatus. In all these cases, the framing underestimates the depth of the transformation underway.

For Brazil, as for any country that does not control this infrastructure, the implications are direct. It is not enough to develop policies for digital sovereignty if the very concept of sovereignty guiding these policies was built for a world of physical borders and states as the only relevant actors. The sovereignty that matters today is also epistemic, infrastructural, and algorithmic.

Even before parliaments or courts deal with the problem, it is necessary for the conceptual repertoire through which we imagine what is possible to do to be updated. It is with this in mind that I write this column.

References

Adler-Nissen, Rebecca, e Tobias Liebetrau. 2026. "Big Tech as World Makers: A Research Agenda for International Political Sociology." International Political Sociology 20 (3): olag021. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olag021.

Molinero, Giulliano. 2026. “What If the End of Democracy Doesn’t Come from the People or the Government? Big Tech and the Capture of the American State.” DPolitik, March 31, 2026.

Späth, Jonas, e Giulliano Molinero Junior. 2025. "Infrastructural Capture: How Big Tech's Dependency Loop Is Reshaping American Statecraft." Policy Analysis 13/2025. Viena: Österreichisches Institut für Internationale Politik.

Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.