The CEAPS Brown Bag seminar titled "Damocles’s Switchboard: Information Externalities and the Autocratic Logic of Internet Control" will be presented by Meicen Sun. This event, sponsored by the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, will be held on February 28, 2025, at 1:00 PM at 306 Coble Hall, 801 S Wright St, Champaign.
This is a hybrid event, offering the flexibility to attend either in person or virtually via Zoom. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link or to confirm your in-person attendance. For more information or to register, please contact Alex Chun at park387@illinois.edu.
Don't miss this insightful discussion on the dynamics of internet control in autocratic regimes.
About the Talk:
This paper advances a theory for the autocratic logic of internet control. Politically motivated internet control generates a positive externality for domestic data-intensive firms and a negative externality for domestic knowledge-intensive research entities. Exploiting a major internet control shock in 2014, I find that Chinese data-intensive firms gained 26 percent in revenue over other Chinese firms as the result of internet control. The same shock incurred a 10 percent decline in research quality from Chinese researchers, conditional on the knowledge intensity of their discipline. It also reduced the research quality from Chinese researchers relative to their US counterparts by 22 percent in all disciplines. Due to the positive data externality, internet control enacted to prevent domestic threats challenges the state’s competing need for data sovereignty against foreign threats. Meanwhile, the state shields certain foreign knowledge-intensive actors from the negative knowledge externality to avoid the immediate economic costs they might otherwise impose. Qualitative evidence supports both implications, highlighting the centrality of short-term interests and foreign actors in autocratic decision-making.
Paper in International Organization: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818324000237
About the Speaker:
Meicen Sun is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines the political economy of information, the geopolitics of data, and information policy. Her writings have appeared in academic and policy outlets, including International Organization, Foreign Policy Analysis, Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum, and the Asian Development Bank Institute. She had previously conducted research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Africa. Bilingual in English and Chinese, she has also written stories, plays, and music and staged many of her works -- in both languages -- in China, Singapore and the U.S. Sun served as a Fellow on the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on China and is an affiliated faculty with the MIT FutureTech. She holds an AB with honors from Princeton University, an AM with a Certificate in Law from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.
https://ischool.illinois.edu/people/meicen-sun
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