II. Economic Concentration, Technology and Authoritarianism: A Reconfigured Relationship

Technology companies’ market concentration is not incidental but rooted in their economic models. Nick Srnicek’s analysis of ‘platform capitalism’ explains how network effects, data advantages and massive capital expenditure requirements create a winner-takes-all dynamic, consolidating control over key digital infrastructures.Footnote ¹⁶ Google’s dominance in search and advertising, Amazon’s leadership in e-commerce and cloud hosting, and Microsoft’s stronghold in enterprise software illustrate how these firms serve as ‘infrastructure providers’ for entire sectors.Footnote ¹⁷ In AI, a handful of companies control scarce compute resources and proprietary foundation models, constraining competition and concentrating power over AI development trajectories.Footnote ¹⁸ This concentration is not only a market failure—it also has profound consequences for human rights and state sovereignty.

The surveillance business model deepens this risk. As Zuboff argues, surveillance capitalism relies on extracting behavioural data from every interaction to predict and manipulate future behaviour, effectively monetising human experience.Footnote ¹⁹ This incentive structure drives companies to invest in pervasive tracking, algorithmic optimisation and opaque behavioural interventions. These technologies are attractive to authoritarian regimes seeking to control populations and to democratic governments under pressure to securitise public spaces.Footnote ²⁰ Through partnerships, licensing agreements and technology transfers, private companies provide turnkey repression infrastructure. Examples include the Chinese companies Huawei, Hikvision and Dahua contracts to implement thermal and face recognition cameras in Argentina and Brazil, or the United States-based company Verint Systems Inc. developing monitoring surveillance systems in Ecuador.Footnote ²¹

These infrastructures are rarely neutral. Scholars like Julie Cohen describe the ‘surveillance–innovation complex’, where state security imperatives and private innovation incentives converge to produce expansive data ecosystems that are difficult to regulate.Footnote ²² The predictive policing systems deployed in Latin America often rely on proprietary algorithms supplied by US, Chinese or European firms, with no transparency about datasets or bias mitigation.Footnote ²³ Such dynamics demonstrate that authoritarian governance increasingly relies on transnational corporate expertise and capital, not solely domestic policy.

This power asymmetry is also evident in content governance. Platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok act as global regulators of expression, with internal policies that shape civic discourse.Footnote ²⁴ Their decisions—what to remove, what to amplify—have profound consequences for conflict dynamics, as evidenced by Facebook’s role in amplifying hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which the United Nations described as a ‘determining factor’ in the genocide.Footnote ²⁵ Cloud providers, too, wield significant structural authority through control over data processing and storage, shaping access to digital services and magnifying corporate influence over both public and private processes.Footnote ²⁶

Market concentration also enables political capture. In the United States and Europe, lobbying by major tech firms has delayed or watered down regulation, particularly around privacy and antitrust enforcement.Footnote ²⁷ The emerging ‘AI safety’ discourse, led largely by industry actors, has been criticised for focusing on speculative future risks while sidelining present harms such as bias, surveillance and labour exploitation.Footnote ²⁸ This dynamic mirrors historical corporate influence over policy during transitional justice processes, where powerful actors negotiated impunity or limited truth-seeking in order to protect economic interests.Footnote ²⁹

Importantly, the influence of technology companies extends beyond regulation into justice processes themselves. In 2023, Chile contracted Unholster, a private analytics company, to use machine learning to locate victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship. While this initiative illustrates the potential of data-driven innovation for truth-seeking, it also raises concerns about delegating sensitive information from victims of the Chilean dictatorship to private actors, particularly around data governance, privacy and accountability.Footnote ³⁰ This is not an isolated example: private companies now provide cloud hosting for human rights archives, security for NGOs and platforms for documenting atrocities, positioning themselves as custodians of memory while also controlling access to evidence.Footnote ³¹

This convergence of economic concentration, surveillance capitalism and privatised governance represents a structural shift. Corporations no longer merely supply tools to authoritarian regimes; they actively shape civic space, evidence ecosystems and justice infrastructures. Market incentives encourage practices—such as data extraction, behavioural targeting and opaque moderation—that can be exploited by authoritarian governments, but which also threaten democracy even in ostensibly free societies—a phenomenon reflected in the concept of ‘digital authoritarianism’, defined as the intentional use of digital technologies by authoritarian regimes to surveil, manipulate and repress populations.Footnote ³²

These examples demonstrate that today’s technology sector has reconfigured the historical relationship between corporate power, authoritarianism and repression. Unlike earlier instances of corporate complicity—where businesses profited from supplying goods, financing or legitimacy to repressive regimes—tech firms now sit at the centre of global governance, controlling infrastructures of visibility, mobility and communication. Their role is both structural and systemic: market concentration amplifies their capacity to influence politics, while their data-driven business models embed incentives that undermine privacy, equality and freedom of expression.

As this trend gains prominence, its implications for the future of the BHR field become increasingly urgent. The rapid evolution of technology and its integration into corporate practices in contexts of repression, conflict and governance fragility demand regulatory frameworks that go beyond traditional accountability models and address both the political and economic dimensions of concentrated corporate power. If the 20th century’s response to market concentration was anti-oligopolistic and antitrust regulation, the 21st century requires a smarter mix of legal and policy measures capable of tackling the unique governance challenges of the digital age.

These dynamics expose profound gaps in existing regulatory frameworks. BHR initiatives have advanced corporate accountability over the past decade, yet—as will be explored in the next section—remain ill-equipped to address harms that are transnational and embedded in core business strategies. The following section examines BHR’s responses to these challenges, highlighting the normative gains made through due diligence, remedy and governance initiatives, and identifying where these approaches fall short in confronting structural power and authoritarian entanglement.

III. Business and Human Rights: Achievements, Limitations and Gaps in Addressing Technology Harms

The BHR field has achieved remarkable normative and institutional advances over the past two decades. The 2011 endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) by the UN Human Rights Council was a watershed moment, codifying the state duty to protect, the corporate responsibility to respect and the need for access to remedy. The UNGPs provided a global baseline for evaluating corporate conduct, influencing trade agreements, investment treaties and procurement policies.Footnote ³³ They also catalysed a wave of NAPs, signalling states’ commitment to integrating human rights into economic governance.Footnote ³⁴ The UNGPs also reshaped corporate practice, pushing multinational companies to institutionalise HRDD, integrate social and environmental risk assessments, and expand Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting frameworks.Footnote ³⁵ HRDD has become an expectation in global supply chains, reinforced by legislation such as the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015), France’s Duty of Vigilance Law (2017), Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (2021) and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (2024). These laws represent a slow but significant shift from voluntary commitments to binding regulation.Footnote ³⁶

Beyond legislation, BHR created a shared language of accountability that informs litigation, advocacy and investor activism. Decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) increasingly cite the UNGPs as persuasive authority, signalling their growing normative influence in the region. Cases such as Vera Rojas et al. v Chile (2021), Miskito Divers (Lemoth Morris et al.) v Honduras (2021) and Workers of the Fireworks Factory in Santo Antônio de Jesus and their Families v Brazil (2020) explicitly invoke the UNGPs to interpret state obligations and, to some extent, corporate responsibilities.Footnote ³⁷ Civil society has leveraged BHR standards to campaign for shareholder resolutions, supply chain transparency and responsible investment, while multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights institutionalised corporate dialogue with NGOs and states.Footnote ³⁸

However, the BHR field faces structural and conceptual challenges that limit its ability to confront today’s technology harms. Scholars warn of ‘proceduralism’: companies often approach HRDD as a compliance exercise, emphasising reporting over transformation.Footnote ³⁹ Rather than attempting to map every limitation of the field, this section focuses on three interconnected concerns: (1) governance fragmentation, (2) Global South marginalisation and (3) access to remedies. Together, these issues not only undermine corporate accountability but also contribute to systemic risk, political instability and authoritarian consolidation.

Fragmentation across trade, competition, data protection and environmental law regimes undermines the coherence of BHR efforts, often leaving corporate accountability siloed within sectoral frameworks. Scholars argue that this fragmentation reflects the absence of a unified regulatory architecture for corporate accountability, where overlapping but uncoordinated regimes create both compliance gaps and opportunities for regulatory arbitrage.Footnote ⁴⁰ Trade and investment treaties, for example, provide corporations with powerful dispute settlement mechanisms, while human rights instruments lack comparable enforcement tools, tilting the balance of power in favour of business interests.Footnote ⁴¹ Competition law’s narrow focus on consumer welfare rather than broader social harms further limits its capacity to address market concentration or structural inequities highlighted in BHR debates.Footnote ⁴² This compartmentalisation has been criticised as reinforcing fragmented regulation that addresses only symptoms rather than underlying corporate power, environmental and civic harms, particularly in the digital age.Footnote ⁴³

For technology companies, this fragmentation is particularly problematic. Digital platforms operate at the intersection of multiple regulatory silos—telecommunications, privacy, competition, intellectual property—allowing firms to exploit gaps between regimes and evade comprehensive accountability.Footnote ⁴⁴ The scale and reach of digital technologies have outpaced society’s ability to manage associated harms, creating a pressing need for a ‘smart mix’ of regulatory and policy measures anchored in human rights standards.Footnote ⁴⁵ Evidence shows that downstream due diligence in the tech sector is both feasible and necessary,Footnote ⁴⁶ yet governance efforts remain fragmented: ethical AI frameworks rarely incorporate human rights principles and regulatory initiatives struggle to keep pace with technological innovation.Footnote ⁴⁷ This regulatory lag enables concentration of economic and political power, raising risks not only of market failure but, as has been argued in this paper, also of democratic erosion, state capture and authoritarian governance.Footnote ⁴⁸

The BHR agenda has also been critiqued for its Global North dominance. Agenda-setting, standard development and enforcement frameworks are often shaped by Northern governments, corporations and international organisations, marginalising voices from the Global South. Scholars drawing on TWAIL perspectives argue that these dynamics reflect the colonial legacies and economic hierarchies embedded in international law, shaping both the design and implementation of corporate accountability frameworks.Footnote ⁴⁹ While the UNGPs claim universality, their practical uptake often reflects Northern priorities, such as supply-chain auditing, ESG reporting and investor-driven risk management, with limited attention to historical inequities and the structural drivers of harm.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the digital age, this imbalance is sharply visible in Latin America, where extractive industries underpin global technology production. Lithium and copper mining—central to battery and AI hardware supply chains—have intensified environmental damage, water scarcity and Indigenous land dispossession, yet these harms are often made invisible in global tech narratives.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, digital infrastructure projects in the region often reproduce patterns of dependency: Latin American governments rely heavily on Big Tech platforms to deliver digital welfare systems, cloud hosting and surveillance technologies, entrenching regulatory asymmetry while outsourcing critical state functions to foreign corporations.Footnote ⁵² Governments’ adoption of biometric identification systems, predictive policing and social protection platforms supplied by US and Chinese firms demonstrates a ‘technological dependency’ that limits domestic regulatory autonomy and reinforces global economic divides.Footnote ⁵³

These patterns reveal that the harms of the digital economy are not merely virtual but materially grounded: the environmental footprint of AI, data centres and surveillance systems—driven by energy-intensive supply chains—magnifies existing socio-environmental injustices in Latin America and the Global South.Footnote ⁵⁴ Despite these realities, decision-making power in AI governance and platform regulation remains concentrated in the North, sidelining affected communities and reinforcing epistemic exclusion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Without systemic reform, these inequities risk deepening social unrest, entrenching extractive economies and enabling authoritarian regimes to consolidate power through technological dependency.

Finally, the access to remedy gap remains profound. Victims of business-related human rights harms—especially in the technology sector—face a fragmented and opaque remedy ecosystem, with overlapping judicial, regulatory and company-level processes that are difficult to navigate.Footnote ⁵⁶ Barriers extend beyond traditional challenges of jurisdiction or discovery: users often cannot identify the responsible entity, lack access to evidence or face retaliation risks when filing complaints.Footnote ⁵⁷ Authoritarian contexts further intensify these barriers, as courts are often frequently captured by ruling parties, undermining judicial independence and due process.Footnote ⁵⁸ Company-based grievance mechanisms, while promoted under the UNGPs, are often narrowly scoped, lack independence and operate with minimal consultation with affected groups, undermining trust and legitimacy.Footnote ⁵⁹

Furthermore, BHR mechanisms have historically focused on individual victims and project-level impacts, but technology-related harms are systemic, diffuse and probabilistic. Disinformation campaigns, algorithmic bias and surveillance ecosystems generate collective harms that are not easily addressed through case-by-case grievance mechanisms.Footnote ⁶⁰ The absence of collective remedy frameworks or structural redress tools further limits the field’s effectiveness, particularly in contexts where harms stem from systemic design choices or platform governance decisions rather than discrete corporate actions. These dynamics illustrate a systemic failure: rather than guaranteeing meaningful participation or redress, current structures often disempower victims, entrench asymmetries of information and power, and rely on voluntary commitments that fall short of international human rights standards.

The next section turns to TJ as a complementary framework. While TJ alone cannot fully resolve these challenges, its experience addressing systemic harm, entrenched power and historical injustice offers tools—such as truth-seeking, collective redress and structural guarantees of non-repetition—that can be adapted to strengthen the BHR field. Section 4 will explore how these TJ mechanisms, when applied to the tech sector, can help bridge accountability gaps and counter authoritarian risk.

IV. Transitional Justice: Origins, Contributions and Lessons for BHR

TJ emerged as a response to widespread and systematic human rights abuses, primarily in post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts.Footnote ⁶¹ Kofi Annan’s seminal 2004 report to the UN Security Council defined TJ as ‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation’.Footnote ⁶² The field developed significantly with Neil Kritz’s three-volume Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, which laid out a systematic approach to transitional mechanisms, emphasising that addressing atrocities requires more than legal responses alone.Footnote ⁶³

Central to TJ are its foundational pillars—truth, justice, reparations, guarantees of non-repetition and memory.Footnote ⁶⁴ Together, these pillars provide a framework not only for redressing harm but also for transforming societies and preventing future abuses. For example, truth commissions investigate and document abuses to provide victims and societies with an authoritative account of the past, while justice mechanisms seek to prosecute perpetrators and restore faith in the rule of law. Reparations programs address victims’ needs through material compensation or symbolic redress, and institutional reforms aim to prevent recurrence by addressing systemic failures. The fifth pillar, memory, preserves narratives of the past, fostering collective reflection to avoid the repetition of atrocities.Footnote ⁶⁵

TJ processes—particularly those developed in Latin America—offer valuable lessons for both prevention and response. In preventive mode, TJ’s emphasis on guarantees of non-repetition provides a framework for building resilient democratic governance structures, shifting entrenched power dynamics, embedding victim participation in decision-making and implementing structural reforms before abuses escalate. Where authoritarian practices are already entrenched, TJ’s truth-seeking, reparations and systemic reform tools offer a remedial pathway to address corporate complicity and rebuild public trust. Integrating these dual approaches into the BHR field could enhance its ability to confront the risks posed by concentrated corporate power in the digital age, while linking regulatory obligations to justice practices rooted in democratic resilience.

Far from being static, TJ has expanded its conceptual and practical scope—most visibly in Latin America, where countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay pioneered TJ approaches that continue to inform global practice.Footnote ⁶⁶ These experiences foregrounded state accountability but also revealed, to some extent, the role of economic actors, including corporations, in enabling authoritarianism and repression.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this sense, one of TJ’s key contributions in the last two decades has been its ability to incorporate the role of economic actors in repression. Investigations in Brazil, Chile and Argentina demonstrated how businesses facilitated authoritarian governance—whether through financing dictatorships, providing surveillance infrastructure, or benefiting from forced labour.Footnote ⁶⁸ More recent initiatives in Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) extend this trajectory by explicitly investigating corporate collusion with paramilitary groups.Footnote ⁶⁹ What makes transitional justice particularly relevant today is its inherent focus on structural violence and its capacity to interrogate the relationships between institutions, economic actors and patterns of harm.

While scholarship on the integration of TJ and BHR frameworks is growing,Footnote ⁷⁰ research that explicitly applies TJ insights to technology governance is still in its infancy.Footnote ⁷¹ It is important to acknowledge that TJ is not a silver bullet for addressing the concentration of power in the tech sector or the complicity of tech sector with authoritarian regimes; instead, my argument is that its institutions and principles offer critical perspectives missing from existing approaches. In particular, TJ’s conceptual and normative framework provides tools to: (1) centre victims and affected communities in decision-making, countering technocratic governance; (2) draw on Global South experience to rebalance North-dominated debates; and (3) rethink reparations through symbolic, collective and transformative measures. I will develop each of these components in the following subsections, highlighting both their potential and limitations for shaping accountability in the digital age.

V. Towards a Future Framework for Business and Human Rights Integrating TJ Mechanisms in the Digital Era

This section proposes a joint BHR–TJ approach that leverages the strengths of both frameworks: BHR’s global regulatory architecture and TJ’s participatory and transformative practices. Rather than presenting TJ as a ‘silver bullet’, the aim is to build a mutually reinforcing model capable of addressing the accountability challenges posed by concentrated corporate power in the digital age.

First, an integrated framework would draw on TJ’s victim-centred ethos to counter the technocratic, corporate-led approaches that often dominate digital governance. Lessons from Latin America’s truth commissions demonstrate that meaningful participation not only legitimises justice processes but also shapes their outcomes. Applying this principle to corporate governance would mean giving communities most affected by digital harms—such as Indigenous groups surveilled through extractive industry partnerships or dissidents targeted by spyware—a formal role in decision-making processes, from algorithmic audits to platform oversight boards. Digital regulation debates are often highly technocratic, privileging engineering or legal expertise, yet incorporating voices from outside these fields can reveal structural links—between surveillance, repression, inequality and extractivism—that are often absent from digital-age narratives. This broader perspective can generate solutions that benefit both affected communities and companies, grounding governance frameworks in lived realities. For instance, in contexts where surveillance technologies are deployed in protest policing, as in Chile and Colombia, a participatory approach could shift regulatory strategies from narrow technical fixes or self-regulation to inclusive, rights-based reform.

Second, TJ’s emphasis on structural transformation aligns closely with BHR’s regulatory and due diligence frameworks, which have increasingly embraced transformative approaches through HRDD and, in conflict-affected contexts, heightened human rights due diligence (hHRDD).Footnote ⁸⁷ hHRDD requires companies to analyse how their operations interact with local conflict dynamics and take proactive measures to mitigate risks. For technology firms—whose platforms shape public discourse and whose tools are often embedded in state surveillance systems—this means moving beyond static assessments to address dynamic and evolving threats. Companies supplying biometric recognition systems, predictive policing algorithms or monitoring platforms must anticipate how their products may contribute to repression, violence or systemic discrimination. Embedding hHRDD obligations into regulatory frameworks would allow governments and international bodies to better address corporate complicity in conflict-related abuses and create stronger safeguards in rapidly changing environments.Footnote ⁸⁸

Latin American experiences of institutional reform following authoritarian regimes further illustrate that accountability for corporate involvement requires more than changes to individual company practices; it demands reforms that are embedded in political and regulatory structures. HRDD, when designed as a transformative process rather than a compliance exercise, can inform these broader reforms by exposing systemic weaknesses—such as gaps in procurement processes, oversight bodies or legal accountability mechanisms—that enable corporate complicity. Integrating these insights into HRDD frameworks would create forward-looking obligations for corporations, requiring not only transparency but demonstrable action to dismantle practices that entrench inequality, surveillance and authoritarian control.

Third, reparations practices developed through TJ also offer a roadmap for addressing the diffuse and collective nature of technology-related harms. Many Latin American states have experimented with combining material compensation and symbolic measures to recognise victims, from memorialisation projects in Argentina and Chile to collective land restitution in Colombia.Footnote ⁸⁹ These approaches are highly relevant for technology governance, where harms such as algorithmic bias or mass disinformation campaigns rarely have a single victim or discrete perpetrator. Inspired by TJ practice, reparations in this context could include community-driven technology audits, investments in decentralised digital infrastructure, or public acknowledgements of corporate complicity in repression. Such measures would expand BHR’s remedy architecture beyond individual grievance mechanisms, recognising that digital harms are systemic, probabilistic and transnational in nature.

Fourth, BHR’s cross-border reach highlights the absence of TJ principles in digital regulation. While TJ mechanisms have historically been state-centred—and only recently expanded to corporate responsibility—they still face the challenge of international accountability. BHR’s focus on transnational litigation, treaties and supply-chain accountability enables the pursuit of justice for harms that originate in global corporate networks. This is particularly relevant for addressing the technology sector’s structural role in surveillance capitalism, where infrastructure and decision-making power are concentrated in a few corporations operating across multiple jurisdictions. Integrating TJ’s emphasis on truth, reparations and structural reform into international corporate accountability tools—such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) or ongoing UN treaty discussions—could make these frameworks more responsive to the systemic nature of digital harm.

Moreover, while BHR principles are increasingly embedded in technology regulation—through international instruments like the UN Global Digital Compact, regional initiatives such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and Artificial Intelligence Act, and national laws inspired by these frameworksFootnote ⁹⁰—transitional justice principles remain virtually absent. This absence means systemic patterns of repression, collective harm and corporate complicity are rarely addressed in regulatory debates, and victims of digital repression continue to lack meaningful avenues for truth or remedy. The exclusion of post-authoritarian and conflict-affected contexts from global AI governance discussions reflects this gap: lessons from transitional justice processes, and the voices of communities most affected by corporate-facilitated harm, are seldom integrated into the digital governance agenda.

Finally, integrating BHR and TJ has profound implications for institutional capacity-building. In Latin America, TJ processes were often sustained by networks of civil society actors, grassroots organisations and international cooperation, demonstrating that institutional reform requires long-term investment in local expertise.Footnote ⁹¹ Translating these lessons to the technology sector suggests that regulating corporate power will demand similar investment: strengthening regulatory agencies in low- and middle-income countries, supporting grassroots watchdog organisations and developing cross-border coalitions capable of monitoring complex corporate supply chains and data infrastructures. This is particularly urgent in fragile or authoritarian contexts where technology companies often step in to provide essential infrastructure, effectively privatising state functions and concentrating decision-making power.Footnote ⁹²

Taken together, these synergies provide a blueprint for a more holistic and future-oriented model of corporate accountability. By embedding TJ’s participatory, reparative and memory-based approaches into BHR’s normative and enforcement structures, this framework moves beyond fragmented regulation and symbolic justice. It offers a model capable of addressing not only individual rights violations but also the systemic dynamics of algorithmic discrimination, surveillance capitalism and global corporate concentration. In doing so, it positions BHR and TJ not as parallel or competing fields but as complementary traditions that, when integrated, can better confront the governance challenges of the digital age.