How Private Sector Regulation works in the Technocapitalist era
Introduction
This essay will critically examine the phenomenon of private sector regulation within the wider context of regulatory capitalism and the global diffusion of privatised markets and regulatory institutions. Within this framework, this essay will posit the key objectives of private regulation and analyse its methods. Furthermore, this essay will investigate the consequences of private sector regulation on democracy, transparency and distribution, emphasising how the diffusion of the regulatory project has potentially extended and legitimised an Anglo-American neoliberal hegemony. Finally, this essay will extend its examination into the private regulations of sex workers in the digital space, highlighting the evolutions of regulatory authority and capacity and its consequences on marginalised communities. By providing a holistic view of critical arguments surrounding the rationale, means and methods of private regulatory capture, this essay aims to outline how this phenomenon has proliferated across different arenas of a global neoliberal project. Thus, this essay suggests adopting a global economy approach to direct future analysis of how states and markets can effectively be regulated through both public and private political mechanisms and allow us to achieve more equitable distributional outcomes.
Contextualising Private Regulation
Firstly, this essay recognises private regulation as a component within overarching market governance, which can be understood by dividing market governance into three broad clusters: laws and regulations, practices and standards, and norms and beliefs which ultimately, “create, define and empower and markets”(Vogel, 2018). Here, an analysis of private regulation recognises its complementary role with public regulation within a larger context of global capitalism. As regulations and the dichotomies that used to structure earlier debate – between private and public, between market and hierarchy, etc – have been eroded within the now dominant concept of a ubiquitous regulatory state (Campbell, 2018). Governance within this essay exists through ex-ante and ex-post regulation which first addresses the establishment of a framework for economic activity and the second its maintenance within states and markets.
This new global order of regulatory capitalism represents a social, political and economic phenomenon as it has resulted in a rethinking of public and private divisions of labour, with mutual restructuring and political engineering necessitated to enable efficient steering and servicing responsibilities (Levi-Faur, 2015). This arrangement and the subsequent rise of private regulation is highlighted by Buthe (2010) who notes how economic activities and actors within and across states and markets have become governed by a set of transnational authorities, rules and standards, set by a range of industry associations, NGOs, firms, technical experts or activists groups. Private actors have captured parts of the regulatory process through “authority, rules and standard-setting” allowing them to enable and constrain wide-ranging economic activities globally while remaining “largely outside the public view” (Buthe, 2010).
The efficiency of private regulation then necessitates an understanding of its critical objectives and parameters. Within a global framework, private regulation is needed to complement direct regulation for two reasons. Firstly, within the global economy, increasing complexity and rapid change have meant that regulators were increasingly removed from product and service innovation (Buthe, 2010). Consequently, the objectives of facilitating efficiency in achieving regulatory harmonisation and thus market integration, with benefits to consumers as voters, ensuring blame avoidance through delegation of technocratic regulatory capture, and the desire to lock in policies have accelerated the rate of private regulatory capture. Referring to the EU Commission for harmonising financial reporting which was ultimately delegated to the private IASB, Buthe (2010) highlights that governments often turn to delegate regulatory authority to private bodies as a way to overcome anticipated or often already experienced political deadlock.
Secondly, private regulation was needed within the global economy because economic activity and corresponding effective regulation had moved beyond the control of one national governance and “slipped seamlessly and unavoidably across national boundaries” (Buthe, 2010). Mayer and Gereffi (2010) highlight how this Polanyian disembeddedment of markets from singular social and state institutions had illuminated the deficits of efficient public regulation. The shift to offshore outsourcing over the past several decades has meant that much of global production now operated across and beyond the jurisdiction of specific national governance institutions in the advanced industrial states, extending beyond the international system of embedded liberalism that is largely confined to the industrialized world (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010). Additionally, international cooperation among government regulators has proven cumbersome, slow, and often ineffective, especially when distributional conflicts are involved. Thus, the move towards private governance can be best seen as a response to societal pressures spawned by economic globalisation and by the inadequacy of public governance institutions in addressing them. As private firms, supply chains, and production networks transcend national boundaries, public systems of economic governance contingent on the singular nation-state are being proven inadequate for efficient regulation of an increasingly “fragmented and footloose global economy” (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010).
Here, an alternative but critical view in the literature also contends how the emergence of private regulation represents a neoliberal moral mea culpa. Analysing the empowerment of private regulators within financial markets following the 2008 crisis, Aalbers (2016) posits how the deregulation of financial and other markets was presented as the scapegoat for the “irrational exuberance”, deflecting attention from systemic interrogation. Thus, private regulatory growth arose ostensibly as an answer to the problem of political control over domestic economies, but on a deeper level pacified demands for legitimacy and as "we audit, and we regulate when we cease to trust" (Levi-Faur, 2015). This further allowed private regulation within a new order of regulatory capitalism to be diffused globally, predicated on its ability to advance tools for integrating social and environmental issues into corporate governance (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010). Consequently, governments and supranational networks of public officials have mostly adopted a permissive attitude toward private regulation, facilitating private collaborations and regulatory actions within and across sectors and allowing the enforcement of contractual obligations based on private rules (Buthe, 2010).
How Private Regulation Succeeds
The success of private regulators within the private sector can be attributed to two methods which ultimately consolidate structures of power and legitimacy. Firstly, private entities successfully regulate other actors within the private sphere through extensions of technocracy and professionalism. This essay develops this argument by engaging the emergence and ascension of the financial accounting profession and analysing its role within private regulation. Here, accounting is recognised as the “common language” through which markets operate (Vogel, 2018). As regulatory emphasis has been refocused on output rather than process legitimacy, accountants as neutral experts regulate private economic actions through auditing, monitoring and reporting “with an efficiency and effectiveness that politicians cannot” Campbell (2018). Indeed, in examining the process of market craft, Vogel (2018) highlights how global accounting standards and professionals support markets by enabling evaluations, comparisons and verification, establishing rules, practices and ultimately trust between private actors within the global economy.
Thus, although accounting began as a way for participants to record transactions and communicate information within economic exchanges, its role as a means of private regulation is significant as the rules and accepted practices of accountants have to come to affect not just how resources are produced and distributed in an economy, but also what is deemed organisationally and socially rational and valuable (Cooper, 2006). Within a historical and comparative analysis of the accounting profession, Cooper posits how the merger movement and the consolidation of capital in the US and UK starting in the 1970s drove efforts in the regulation of accounting rules, aided and influenced significantly by multi-national companies, industry lobby groups and employer organizations, such as the Business Roundtable. Consequently, the practices, standards and beliefs of accounting today emerged through complex alliances, agreements and accords between public and private agencies of various accounting and auditing matters, continually shaping regulation across national jurisdictions.
Today six multinational accounting firms audit 96 of the top 100 British firms and 494 of the Fortune 500. Accountants as professionals and private regulators, serve the interests of their firms in deciding for what purpose the accounts shall be massaged, and what message they shall convey to the markets and societies at large. (Strange, 1996). The influence and inputs of the accounting profession as a technocratic institution shape opportunities for private regulatory agencies to affect outcomes of the regulatory process and eventually, “democratic control and legitimacy” (Cooper, 2006). Sociological analysis highlights how “institutionalising the rule-making privilege” of accountants as technocrats have safeguarded their professional influence over the rules and allowed them to disperse and promote the dominant notions of “management, organisation, performance and agency” (Buthe 2010; Cooper, 2006). This analysis draws attention to the construction and maintenance of the accountant's “professionalism” by appealing to forms of social and cultural capital. Research on the “socialisation and acculturation” of accounting trainees by Cooper (2006) extends how “the practices, norms and beliefs of accounting professionals are both a medium and outcome of their institutional configuration” as attention is given to matters of appearances such as dress sense, and personal grooming alongside matters of communication such as ways of talking and writing.
Secondly, private actors can impose regulations through their ability to affect corporate governance as shareholderism has allowed for the diffusion of regulatory responsibility and accommodated a rethinking of corporate governance through social and shareholder activism. In this view, shareholderism has facilitated efficient private regulation operating within the global economy through the establishment of monitoring mechanisms, rules and procedures for imbuing social and environmental objectives within the private actions of corporations. Vogel’s (2018) research on the US supports this shift towards a shareholder model as he illuminated how activist institutional shareholders lobbied governments to improve shareholder protections, permit stock options, raise standards for shareholder representation and consequently win a “greater voice in corporate governance”. Ultimately shareholderism has enabled the efficient regulation of markets by private actors by, introducing a triple bottom line within business decisions. NGOs and private entities, play a crucial role through their agenda-setting power as demanders of private regulation as well as their role in monitoring business practices (Buthe, 2010)
Through this phenomenon, many social activists began to shift to direct pressure on corporations to change their behaviour. Building upon a historical IPE analysis, Mayer and Gereffi (2010) outline how demand for corporate codes of conduct, arose in the 1990s as “the most visible and widespread form of private governance”. Here, decade-long campaigning fought to bring some elements of social responsibility to international subcontracting networks as activist shareholders, despite lacking direct material stakes, realised how industrial governance structures established by global firms could also be leveraged to achieve positive externalities. Innovations in private governance began in the apparel sector as Levi Strauss, the American jeans maker, was one of the first MNCs to tout its corporate code of conduct in 1991, using provisions against employing forced and child labour to justify its supplier choices (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010). These first-party codes eventually evolved into the third-party certification arrangements we see today, whereby independent private external groups monitor provisions in many sectors today where there are now jointly agreed upon codes and standards for such things as greenhouse gas emissions accounting, sustainable timbering practices, electrical product safety standards, and many others (Buthe, 2010). NGOs play a significant role not only in detecting exploitative labour practices in global supply chains but also in orchestrating well-coordinated campaigns which pressure leading multinationals with highly visible brands to “improve working conditions in their global network of suppliers” and to “participate in equity-oriented programs” (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010).
In contrast to public regulation wherein citizens accept state governance following their participation in the democratic process, private regulation lacks that quality. Thus, an explanation for the means and methods of efficient private regulation within the context of global capitalism is complemented through an analysis of how private regulators gain legitimacy. Firstly, within Fuchs and Kalfagianni’s (2010) research on the private regulation of the global food industry, a two-dimensional role of ideational factors, in interplay with material structures, was identified which facilitate or constrain access to sources of legitimacy, and in turn, transforming “private power” into “private authority” and “regulation ” into “right regulation”. The construction of legitimacy via ideational structures consists of two dimensions: “a constitutive dimension” that reflects norms and beliefs; and “a strategic dimension” trying to achieve certain ends by attempting to influence these norms and mindsets. In this view, the “power to govern” results primarily from material structures, while the “authority to govern” primarily results from ideational structures (Fuchs and Kalfagianni, 2010)
Additionally, knowledge has also served as a fundamental source of legitimacy for private actors. Possession of expertise or “technical authority” allows private actors to elicit compliance with their rules because they are perceived as having an objective quality and political neutrality within epistemic communities (Fuchs and Kalfagianni, 2010). Thus, dominant private regulators attempt to create brand loyalty and instil trust to appear as valuable agents performing fundamental roles for society and gaining legitimacy as political actors (Fuchs and Kalfagianni, 2010). Corporate governance then, becomes authoritative because retailers are viewed as effective, knowledgeable actors who address health, safety, environmental and social concerns Consequently, private actors can shape, influence and undertake market governance and spread techniques of control transnationally and across sectors, assuring compliance through their legitimacy (Levi-Faur, 2015). Institutionalised within regulatory structures, private actors have authority as their underpinnings: enjoying the highest level of Bourdiean “consecration”, and are positioned to grant or withhold symbolic recognition “by virtues of their decisions, symbolic capital and special authority”. (Kretschmer, 2022)
Assessing Private Regulatory Outcomes
The upshot of private regulatory capture is nuanced. This essay will now assess the consequences of this phenomenon against its critical objectives and expand key arguments regarding benefits and consequences. Firstly, the emergence of private regulators who design rules, enforce standards and monitor compliance within the global market has enriched and streamlined responses to rapid developments within markets and technologies, overcoming the limitations of unilateral state-bound political quagmires. In assessing the global diffusion of regulatory capitalism, Levi-Faur (2005) outlines how private regulation has enabled governments to “solve or ameliorate inherently transnational problems”. Here, Levi-Faur highlights how the increased awareness of truly global environmental problems, regional social issues, or systemic financial risks necessitated the rise of private regulators that operated in tandem with state powers. A further example of empowered regulatory technologies and their potential is further expounded by Braithwaite (2008), who raises an example of statutorily empowered qui tam enterprise enabling private prosecutors and regulatory inspectors within a “circle of accountability” between private individuals, the state, and the judiciary. In this view, it stands to reason that the rise of efficient private regulation has challenged entrenched monopolies of power, reopening the field for “a more balanced approach to the distribution of power and resources” within regulatory capitalism (Levi-Faur, 2011).
However, two negative consequences of private regulatory capture signal a need for further interrogation of private regulatory capture. Firstly, the efficiency of private regulators has had the negative consequence of creating second-order apolitical democracies that lack transparency. Here, this essay affirms the significance of regulatory regimes and their impacts on “distributive, redistributive and constitutive processes and outcomes” (Benish and Levi-Faur, 2020). As efficient global private regulatory capture has recast territorial political economy approaches as functional ones, the separation of regulatory functions is becoming increasingly salient and are the new frontiers where the state redefines itself. The visible element of this division of labour is the rise of the private regulator who attempts to “forestall and minimise the need for government intervention” (Buthe, 2010). The new servants of states and markets are “regulocrats”, who are institutionalised within a new transnational order where global networks of experts become a major source of innovations, world views, accountability and legitimacy. (Levi-Faur, 2011)
Secondly, the means and methods of private regulation technocracy and corporate governance, sustain and extend Anglo-American neoliberal hegemony under the guise of natural order and principles of market efficiency, obfuscating the redistributions of wealth and resources globally (Harcourt, 2008). Analysing the ‘postwar global age of capitalist growth’ through which the American state shaped European reconstruction, Pantich and Gindin (2009) posit how this involved the export of American banking techniques and expertise, facilitating an explosion of foreign direct investment by American multinational corporations. This global explosion of American corporations and banks meant the implantation of American capital as a class force inside social formations, whereby governance through economic expertise, social norms, and cultural habits was transmitted internationally. Furthermore, these financial packages frequently came with new professional business services and consumer services as American Financial institutions have, providing the major market for the information revolution and developing key digital technologies and systems for themselves (Panitch and Gindin, 2009).
The deepening and extension of technocratic financial markets serviced by professionals have become more than ever fundamental to the reproduction and universalization of American power (Panitch and Gindin, 2009). Neoliberal hegemony emerged to stabilise the relationship between the American economy and the other advanced capitalist countries, even though it was other countries which eventually suffered the worst long-term effects (Panitch and Gindin, 2009). These regulations are shaping a new global order that reflects the set of problems and solutions that were socially and politically constructed in some dominant countries and regions as the scenarios under which private regulation strengthens public authority require a level of state capacity that can be assumed for advanced industrialised democracies but is often lacking in developing countries. Hence, private authority potentially perpetuates or even accentuates the power imbalance between the “rule-making” North and “rule-taking” South recasting the roles of sovereign politics (Levi-Faur, 2005; Buthe, 2010).
Analysis of the emergence of African regulatory capitalism has charted the growth and spread of firms and practices associated with regulatory capitalism within the region as regulation has emerged within the region as a form of governance and ultimately politics. (Klaaren, 2021). Per Aalbers (2016), neoliberal practices did not entail institutional retreat so much as they facilitated the expansion and consolidation of the networks of institutional linkages that sustained the imperial power of Anglo-American finance’. Subsequently, the emergence and institutionalisation of efficient private regulations allowed for a “regulated deregulation” that functions beyond the preservation of power, expanding it too. (Aalbers, 2016). The dynamics and effects of the transatlantic regulatory feedback loop that emerged during the 1960s and stimulated processes of privatising financial regulation have steadily gathered pace in the following decades (Green, 2016).
This argument is further enriched through an assessment of the dominant role of Anglo-American accounting professionals. To this end, an analysis by Strange (1996) posits how the domination of large US firms in international business, and the large number of old-established British multinationals gave an advantage to the large Anglo-American accountancy partnerships to whom many of them were already regular clients. That familiarity, combined with the domination of New York and London as financial centres, helped a process of concentration in which large partnerships swallowed small ones to sustain systems of power and domination. Thus, this essay contends that efficient private regulators within the Anglo-American neoliberal hegemony are shaped and influence the advancement of market governance globally within a regulatory feedback loop. How professional organizations make claims about specific activities and expertise, and the nature of the claims they make, are influenced by their histories, allegiances and struggles with other occupations and economic institutions (Cooper, 2006). Studies across the nexus of the accounting profession within imperialism trace the role of the accounting profession in helping to constitute specific views of nationhood, facilitating the spread of international capital and communicating forms of accounting and management knowledge (Cooper, 2006).
Analysing Private Regulation of Sex Workers Online
Evolutions within the World Wide Web, today have seen dominant digital platforms and service providers emerge as unaccountable multinational powers and private regulators. They survey our private sphere and accumulate data, they dominate commerce and evade democratic control (Kretschmer, 2022). Since 2016, a flurry of policy initiatives has focused on digital platforms as a regulatory object of a novel kind such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill and the EU’s Cyber Blue Line. This is a global trend, with reports and interventions in major jurisdictions that compete in shaping a new regulatory regime. States are worried about their sovereignty in the context of the power of big tech and may end up delegating what are traditionally state regulatory powers to these platforms. As the creation of new obligations has necessitated regulators to anticipate and prevent future harm instead of responding to harm, these obligations will be enforced by digital platforms and service providers via the terms of service of platforms, and their content moderation policies. (Kretschmer, 2022). This essay will engage this phenomenon and analyse the means through which private regulators police cyberspace and outline their consequences in the case of the digital sex industry for whom the Internet has become an important means of connecting through “virtual communities” for information sharing and mutual support (Sanders, 2018).
The terms of use of billing companies, platform providers and hosting services often leverage legal distinctions between lawful and unlawful activities. However, sometimes these terms widely depart from public legal standards in prohibiting legally acceptable activities for digital sex workers, on or off camera, establishing requirements that are not based on law or community standards but rather on market risk and brand imaging. This departure from legal norms is often driven by exogenous factors, such as the fear of negative publicity, damage to reputation, public outcry, or potential loss of investors as the threshold test for content regulation has moved from obscenity and offensiveness under the law to profitability and risk under capitalist enterprise (Stardust, 2018). Crawford and Gilespe (2016) posit regulation through terms of service as a ‘monarchic structure’ of governance in which decision-making on whether to remove or suspend is solely up to the platform and is non-negotiable. To this end, terms of service as a method of private regulation have become the “governing documents” of the digital age, obscuring democratic discourse about what constitutes harmful or offensive content and leaving no room for ‘vital public negotiations’ (Crawford and Gilespe, 2016). These regulatory mechanisms govern how sex markets operate, functionally censoring sex workers and limiting how they communicate with each other and their customers. This is exemplified in two instances.
Firstly, through terms of service, payment actors most notably the major US credit card companies exert structural power over online payment systems, determining rules and processes and distinguishing between acceptable and prohibited actions and performances. Tusikov (2021) examines the role of payment platforms in the US and sex censorship, highlighting how platforms have a pattern of denying financial services to people and businesses involved in publishing legal sexual content. Here, financial service providers function as private regulators and are shown to systematically target a wide range of people working in the online sex trade and retail adult entertainment industry, creating “differential and discriminatory access to financial services” (Tusikov, 2021). Through this, digital payment platforms functionally played a major governance role in creating and maintaining the regulatory infrastructure upon which much of the digital sexual market operates. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express set the rules governing the use of their services, which their networks of affiliated financial institutions must obey if they want to offer their credit cards as payment options online, ultimately piling on sex workers in “precarious positions” during periods of economic downturn (Tusikov, 2021).
Secondly, fear of legal repercussions has led to platforms passing terms and services which heavily censor the discourse of digital sex workers. Analysing the passing of FOSTA-SESTA laws in the US, Blunt (2020) outlines how the stated goals of the Communications Decency Act to limit human trafficking by “holding internet platforms accountable” led to over-enforcement in the United States and global consequences for sex workers like the loss of safe advertising platforms. As the vagueness of FOSTA-SESTA failed to define the parameters of “human trafficking” and conflated sex trafficking with consensual sex works, digital platforms filled in the gap, this resulted in the removal of online community spaces for online sex workers (Blunt, 2020). Interviews with sex workers noted how this adversely affected financial stability, health outcomes and exposure to violence as those who rely on sex work as their primary form of income found themselves stripped of the tools they had used to keep themselves safe (Blunt, 2020).
Put together, private digital regulators are granted considerable latitude, through their contractual terms-of-use agreements with their users, to interpret and enforce their rules. Platforms’ implementation and enforcement of these rules, typically undertaken with little independent oversight or public disclosure constitute a form of private ordering (Tusikov 2021). Ultimately, this has created an environment where sex worker populations are driven into financial insecurity, by ever-changing, often vague, and largely unexplained regulation changes on digital sex work platforms: what was and was not permitted in terms of content on any particular platform (Hamilton, 2022) which, results in them being more vulnerable to labour exploitation and trafficking in the sex industry. Hamilton’s (2022) research showed sex workers online described being highly attentive to the “ever-changing, often vague, and largely unexplained regulation changes on digital sex work platforms” (Hamilton, 2022). These terms of service frequently regulated identity as a sex worker, not just sexual content. The impacts of private regulatory terms and conditions have resulted in online sex workers resorting to self-censoring and developing alternate language to still communicate with their clients in messaging, material and captions in an attempt to avoid platform loss.
Content moderation of digital sex work utilises compliance software to pick up keywords that identify and flag potentially prohibited content. When content is algorithmically and automatically screened for easily identifiable illegal content, these blunt mechanisms inevitably create collateral damage In the case of digital sex workers, Stardust (2018) argues how blanket rules regardless of context ‘make legitimate conversations impossible’ as an important dialogue about sexuality is made invisible and becomes unspeakable. The lack of transparency regarding regulatory software, algorithms and automated mechanisms, and how they are being implemented has elevated digital service and platform providers as have become the unelected gatekeepers of public discourse.
The combination of “proprietary algorithms” assessing relevance, opaque human intervention processes, and the “lack of any visible public discussion” leaves critical decisions about difficult content in the hands of a few unknown figures at social media companies without any public record or spaces for contestation by affected sex workers who find their revenue flows strangled without warning. (Crawford, 2016). This content moderation process is both proactive and reactive. Digital regulators function within a system of “proactive monitoring, screening and scrutiny” as platforms can designate certain behaviour as “inappropriate” for their services, even if that behaviour is lawful. and, in the absence of formal legal orders, issue user sanctions such as temporary or permanent suspension of noncompliant bad actors. Research on PayPal’s regulatory capacity shows how it relies on its routine surveillance of its users’ activities and transactions as part of its data-intensive business model (Tusikov, 2019).
The consequences of ceding regulatory authority to private regulatory authorities, whether proactively or reactively, raise serious procedural and normative challenges (Tusikov, 2019). First, such regulation often occurs in the absence of due process as sex workers may not be informed before they lose critical commercial services and platforms may lack robust appeals processes. Secondly, this allows private regulators to arbitrate behaviour and decide content considered acceptable. As platforms’ business interests may appeal to conservative values because they are driven by commercial motives and don’t wish to “isolate their advertisers” or “jeopardise their revenue stream”, this fundamentally conflicts with their regulatory efforts and disproportionately stifle the economic actions of digital sex workers as marginalized populations (Tusikov, 2019). Stardust (2018) critiques the figure of “the white, heterosexual, able-bodied man” as the basis on which “reasonableness and objectivity” are defined. In summary, private regulation of online sex markets affords no transparency in the governance process despite determining not only the livelihoods of sex workers but also what sexual information and imagery can be “shared, represented and remembered”.(Stardust, 2018)
A critical view in the literature highlights how this has enabled the systemic infiltration of a neoliberal ‘corporate ethic’ (Marwick, 2010) into how sex workers present themselves online. The result is personas that are ‘highly edited, controlled, and monitored, conforming to ideals of a work-safe, commercial self-presentation’ (Marwick, 2011). Diffusing the regulatory project within the digital sex industry, this phenomenon transferred responsibility for regulation from corporations to local producers, and then again onto performers themselves. To this end, private regulatory capitalism enforces self-censorship and the fusion of corporate values with individual values. In turn, this censorship and cultural engineering reshape the social and political landscape too, deciding who is ‘intelligible’ and which ‘bodies matter’ (Stardust, 2018). As a result, private regulation through restrictions on terms of service and ubiquitous surveillance online contribute to the harm and marginalisation that sex workers already experience offline. Legislation like FOSTA-SESTA understood within this context highlights a larger phenomenon of how the ongoing history of laws and regulations that utilise technology and public-private partnerships “to police women and marginalised communities “(Blunt, 2020)
Applying a global economy perspective enriches this analysis, further highlighting how although dominant payment and social platforms function internationally, they conduct business within a U.S. legal framework that classifies sex work as illegal and thus choose to prevent sex workers from any country from doing business through their platforms. In this view, it stands to reason that this stems from the “morality of an American-dominated Internet” which encodes “American puritan values” in technology platforms and manifests as a moral and imperial regulatory project, placing sex workers on the margins while exporting laws and norms internationally (Barwulor, 2021). Thus, even sex workers who attempt to use mainstream technology to do perfectly legal activities according to their country of residence find themselves facing surprising repercussions, having their accounts frozen, blocked, or completely deleted without warning because they were suspected of being a sex worker, even though many are doing their work legally. Not only are sex workers blocked from working on certain platforms, but they are discriminated against based only on their profession as Barwulor (2021) notes how sometimes these platforms even go so far as to “shut down accounts and freeze assets” and block users for life despite them no longer providing sexual services
Conclusion
In conclusion, this essay has provided a linear argument to the question, illustrating how some private regulators efficiently govern other parts of the private sector within the context of global regulatory capitalism. This essay has contextualised the growth in scope, importance and consequences of private regulation and how this has allowed an “intertwining of society, economics and politics” across vastly different industries from clothing manufacturing to food production (Levi-Faur, 2005). Focusing on the case of private regulation in the digital space however, this essay has also highlighted a need for future analysis on the field of private regulatory capture to recognise how it potentially sustains structures of power, “protects the status quo” and marginalises vulnerable communities (Stardust, 2018). Thus, further research is necessitated into the alternatives to private regulation within global markets and how we might safeguard public interests within private decision-making processes (Buthe, 2010). This essay has argued that a global economy approach to understanding private regulation might best accommodate the future analysis required into its socio-historical origins, its spheres of influence today and its potential for good.
