Abstract

This article argues that certain digital infrastructures constitute a form of global ordering. Infrastructures, in this sense, are not merely widely used technologies but systems that others must rely on to act. The infrastructures’ operators are, therefore, actors of global governance. The infrastructures’ operation, in turn, constitutes a matter of concern for global publics. Therefore, the global ordering effects of digital infrastructures such as Starlink’s satellite network, SpaceX’s launch systems, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic’s foundation models, Amazon and Microsoft’s data centers and cloud services, and Meta and TikTok’s social media platforms ought to be incorporated into political and legal analyses of global governance.

 Infrastructural ordering intensifies and modifies existing modes of ordering through largely corporate-controlled material-computational architectures that directly shape and constrain individual and societal action. Most importantly, we observe a mismatch between the material and computational modality of power and the normative, rules-based modality of accountability. Because many of these material arrangements are categorized as apolitical (as matters of property, business, or technology), their governance dimensions and ordering effects often remain unaddressed. They are, clearly, all of these at once: business enterprises, owned assets, webs of contractual relations, and, in many instances, seemingly innocuous practices. Yet taken together, their ordering effects are difficult to deny.

This calls for rethinking entrenched public-private dichotomies, as well as the adequacy of existing accountability structures in law, particularly in international and corporate law. Put reversely, regulating infrastructural ordering relies as much on international and transnational efforts as it requires domestic and local reforms of only seemingly innocuous rules of corporate, procurement, and regulatory law.

The article situates these developments within the longer history of private ordering at global scale and identifies several distinctive features of contemporary infrastructural ordering: materiality, immediacy, corporate form, embeddedness, (geo)politicization, and contestation. It concludes by exploring emerging forms of accountability and arguing for institutional, normative, and conceptual experimentation to meet the challenge of establishing a just global governance regime for the 21st century.

Keywords: digital infrastructure, global order, governance, social media