Twitter Takeover Is Not A Regular Corporate Takeover. It Raises Many Questions About Cyber Sovereignty

Twitter finally gave in to the hostile takeover attempt by billionaire Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk. This single takeover is worthy of many future doctoral studies pertaining to the reality and sovereignty of the cyber world. This is not an ordinary and regular corporate takeover, but raises many questions pertaining to physical sovereignty versus virtual sovereignty. 

Why The Twitter Takeover

Corporate takeovers are usually carried out with an intention to expand an existing business, or acquire new business that has potential to profit earnings, or for the purpose of scaling up. Did Elon Musk acquire Twitter with any of these purposes? 

The answer is plain and simple no. 

This could be corroborated with the fact that he has made his intentions clear that he wants to make Twitter a private business. To pay an exorbitant price of $44 billion, and get it delisted from stock exchanges is no joke. He has arranged this money in his personal and individual capacity. Twitter as a business would undergo great uncertainty and there may be a arrival of a rival Twitter-like social media platforms. 

Why did Musk, then, acquire a business when he is least interested in its business? 

He has minced no words in expressing his intent and purpose behind the acquisition of Twitter. He wishes to make it private so he could make rules in consonance with his own understanding of “saving democracy”. 

Twitter users would now play by the rules determined by Elon Musk and his kitchen cabinet as allowed by the Company Law of the USA. The only statutory condition he is bound by now is that he must comply with company rules for private companies. He is free to make rules, and policies that he thinks fit for what he calls restoring “freedom of speech and expression”.

In simple words, he wishes to legislate, execute and perhaps decide who has broken these rules or not. 

Twitter and Sovereign States

Not in the very distant past, India’s then Union minister for information and technology Ravi Shankar Prasad had found his Twitter account suspended. Courts in India also found themselves utterly helpless to even get the platform to comply with its orders. 

Twitter is not even a business incorporated in India. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code), Rules, 2021, were framed by the Government of India exclusively to deal with cyber world-related enterprises, such as Twitter. 

The efficacy of these rules in terms of desired results is always questionable. 

Now, this platform, which would be a privately owned enterprise, would have sovereign heads using it to communicate with the world and their own people. 

Twitter And Internet

The concept of sovereign, primarily, involves those acts, which are prerogative for institutions referred to as states. For example, law making is an exclusive prerogative of the state, no one else can do that. However, the internet is an exception. The rules for its management and governance are made by a private entity called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and they are binding on states. 

Twitter is a tool that uses internet protocol. Thus, sovereign states are bound by the rules made by ICANN and, also, enterprises such as Twitter that use the internet. As a result, we witness that sovereign institutions find themselves subject to the rules made by private entities with questionable powers to regulate them.

Twitter is subject to the USA laws, and hence it has perhaps some leverage over the functioning of the company within its constitutional liberties. Nevertheless, sovereign entities like India and other states have very little sway. 

India will be subject to the definition of freedom of speech and expression as understood by Musk and his team. Indian courts would have no say over their understanding of this definition, which is going to bind Indian legislature and executive. 

Takeaway From Twitter Takeover

Cyber security and cyber sovereignty would be posing a threat to international world order as never seen before. They have already heralded the paradigm shift in the world order, of which the UN charter is the constitution. Corporations are already more powerful than many states. This takeover by a private individual makes the situation more alarming. 

These corporate giants are already bigger than many nation-states — for perspective, the Sri-Lankan economic crisis is of just $51 billion. This is a shining example for change in the world order and arrival of an international technological order of which corporations would be the main player. They would determine the election outcomes, fate of an armed conflict and industrial health of any state. States should fasten their seat-belts and prepare to wrest back their cyber sovereignty. 

The author is a PhD fellow at Hamburg University. He has written two books on financial laws.

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