Prologue: Why “Strong Institutions” now begin in the feed
In the twentieth century, authoritarianism announced itself in spectacle: banned newspapers, shuttered unions, book burnings. In the twenty‑first century, it often whispers through design. The slider in a recommendation model dims a voice without deleting a post. A cloud policy disables a watchdog’s infrastructure at the edge of a billing cycle. A data broker’s file enables precision intimidation. These are not hypotheticals; they are now ordinary operations in the pipes that carry public life.
For the fifteenth consecutive year, global internet freedom declined, driven by AI‑accelerated manipulation, pervasive surveillance, and intensifying controls on connectivity and content. The pattern spans regime types, affecting democracies and autocracies alike. Crucially, a great deal of this power sits outside formal government, in private infrastructures that function as de facto public institutions: social feeds, app stores, ad exchanges, cloud providers, and model hubs.
These actors decide what is findable, what counts as credible, and who effectively disappears, often long before any public authority intervenes.
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Power in the Pipes (Part II) Corporate Digital Authoritarianism
Adtech, data brokers, AI labs, and cloud vendors as a supply chain of control
The contemporary information environment is shaped not only by states or political movements, but increasingly by a complex assembly of commercial infrastructures that mediate public life. Global assessments show a clear trajectory: internet freedom has declined for fifteen consecutive years, driven by online manipulation, pervasive surveillance, and controls on connectivity and content. At the same time, independent evaluations of major technology companies reveal persistent stagnation in transparency, governance, and accountability, with no company scoring above 50% in the 2025 Ranking Digital Rights Index.
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