Corporate Quasi‐Sovereignty: Big Tech and the Politics of Sovereign Authority in the Digital Age

Abstract

As private technology firms expand their control over critical infrastructures, questions of sovereignty and governance are increasingly displaced from states to corporate actors. Existing scholarship on sovereignty assumes that authority is either monopolized by states or shared through institutionalized public–private arrangements. Yet, recent events, including SpaceX's control of wartime communications in Ukraine, Meta's confrontation with the Australian government, and OpenAI's attempts to shape global AI regulation, demonstrate that firms can exercise discretionary authority without formal delegation, legal accountability, or democratic oversight. This study introduces the concept of Corporate Quasi‐Sovereignty (CQS) to theorize how certain technology firms function as de facto sovereign actors. CQS is defined by the convergence of three enabling dimensions: infrastructural command, executive autonomy, and normative or geopolitical assertion. Drawing on Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), this paper theorizes ‘sovereignty windows’ as the mechanism through which firms internally collapse the problem, policy, and politics streams, enabling unilateral interventions with geopolitical consequences. ‘Stream collapse,’ the internalization of all three MSF streams within a single corporate hierarchy, is operationalized as a boundary condition of MSF, distinct from conventional stream coupling. The ‘conditional policy entrepreneur’ is introduced as the corporate analogue to Kingdon's entrepreneur: a founder‐CEO who exercises this role only when all three CQS enabling conditions simultaneously converge. Drawing on comparative case analyses of Meta, SpaceX, and OpenAI, the article shows how CQS captures both reactive and anticipatory modes of corporate authority, showing that firms now operate as both market actors and quasi‐sovereign agents capable of substituting, bypassing, or preempting state power.