Data governance models and geopolitics : insights from the Indo-Pacific region

Abstract

Cyberspace is widely recognised as an “object of geopolitical competition” between countries advocating for an open internet space and countries that aim to use this space as a tool for control. The Indo-Pacific region represents one of the most contested and strategically significant domains, principally because of the role of China, which hosts the world’s largest cohort of internet users and also the most sophisticated internet censoring and monitoring regime. Regulation of the internet has moved from attempting to regulate the flow of information into countries to also including attempts to regulate the data flowing out of countries, efforts which in both cases appear to have economic and political rationales that are often hard to disentangle.3 The flow of information into a country can be regulated with different policies, including censorship and filtering (which can happen in different layers of the internet infrastructure) and also with market access restrictions, which can take the form of strict licensing regulations, joint-venture requirements, maximum foreign equity shares and nationality requirements which can apply to certain sectors sensitive to the spread of information, e.g. online news, social media and blogs, among others. On the other hand, the flow of information out of a country can be restricted through regulation of the processing and transfer of data, which can consist in requiring certain data to be processed within the borders of the country or companies to meet certain conditions before data can be transferred abroad. Regulation of cross-border data flows has become a major focus of geopolitical contestation, reflecting the importance of data as a strategic asset in the digital era and the symbolic importance data privacy and security have assumed in general discourse on democracy vs autocracy. This paper characterises the data policies that apply in 15 Indo-Pacific economies and the emerging pattern of bilateral and plurilateral cooperation on cross-border data flows. A premise of the analysis is that differences in data regulation and the patterns and types of international cooperation between states provide insights into the inclusive and exclusive geopolitical dynamics in the region.