The international arena has many actors that can influence digital infrastructures. But opinions differ on what the important ones are, or even what the relevant ones are. But the international arena matters, because by the nature of scaling, very few digital infrastructures are influenced by a single national actor only.

A word of clarification: I am using the word international here to mean all nations in the world, and their interrelations. In US vernacular, the word international appears to mean all nations, except the US. Instead, the word global is used to mean all nations, including the US.

The international arena is complex, and there are conflicting views on how it is made up. These conflicting views can best be seen as maps of the territory. And as I have mentioned earlier, a map is only relevant for a specific purpose.

The first category of actors is nations, obviously. The word nation is part of the word international. But we can see many other actors exerting influence, such as multinational corporations, NGOs (non-governmental organisations), treaty organisations, and so on. Let’s break this down a bit.

Nations make laws, multinational corporations make investments and offer products, NGOs such as ISO make standards, treaty organisations such as the EU make more standards and regulations. All of these may impact digital infrastructures. And sometimes these are conflicting.

Not everybody shares this multifaceted view of the international arena. Some hold that nation states are the only actors that have real power. After all, they control the territory on which people live, and have a monopoly on military force and a legal monopoly on violence.

In this view, nations enable the other types of actors through law and agreements within and between them. Multinational corporations don’t really exist in this view. They are constructs enabled by agreements between nations, for example on recognizing property across borders. For example, how is it possible that a national of one country can hold property in another country? This is not universally the case. Many countries do not allow this, at least not unlimited.

A multinational corporation, even if it has public shareholders across the globe, has a primary residence somewhere. And the legal options and obligations trickle down from there.

Similarly, NGOs such as ISO (International Standards Organisations) and the International Criminal Court are also established somewhere, and recognized by other countries, or not recognized, as the case may be.

Digital infrastructures don’t necessarily map easily to a single organisation running them, or even governing them. The internet is a interesting and complicated example. On a day to day basis, internet service is largely provided by telecommunications companies owning the cables and radio base stations. Administering the coordination between these and other providers, is done by many actors. For example the use of IP adresses is coordinated by a non-profit established in the US. But there are many more players in that space, often independent.

In contrast to the multi-nation view of the world is the perspective that what really matters in the international arena are the multinational corporations. They have significant control over the international flow of goods, services and investments. Understand that many of these corporations have annual turnovers that are larger than the gross domestic product of 80% of the world’s countries.

Large businesses have the capability to drive government policies. Even US presidents see that. President Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex in 1961. President Biden extended that, and warned against the power of the tech industry and AI in particular in his last speech in 2024.

This is not hypothetical. There has been succesful lobbying by US companies against international regulation that is seen as limiting to them.

Many multinational organisations are largely legitimate, but there are quite a few whose main objective is to launder money outside of the control of nations. Beyond that, when it comes to cybersecurity, internationally organised crime has business models that include ransomware extortion and bitcoin mining on hacked computers.

Then there is the perspective that the only really important international actor is the US. With more than 700 military bases in more than 80 countries, this is the single largest international military presence in the history of mankind. Additionally, since the end of world war II, the US has alledgedly intervened in dozens of countries, through military or other means, three times more than Russia, the next contender. By the way, these numbers are hard to validate precisely, though the order of magnitude is uncontested.

Beyond this, the US dollar is the currency of reserve for most of the world, and the US stock markets dominate international capital markets.

As a final alternative perspective, it is conceivable that there are people who think China has always been, and will be, the economic superpower of the world, with a brief 200 year interuption which is about to end.

All these actors may exert power over digital infrastructures. And to confuse matters even more, these actors do not always acknowledge the power, or even the existence, of other actors. We’ll discuss some examples of this elsewhere.