ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that rather than focusing on moments of sectoral transgression by technology firms as a strategy for shaping regulation and democratic checks and balances, we should pay attention to how firms actively create public-sector demand, conceptualising and inventing new spaces in relation to essential services that can only be fulfilled by technological innovation. It explores how the concentration of commercial technological power witnessed during the pandemic is indicative of, and facilitated by, pre-pandemic structural shifts evidenced in multiple jurisdictions in South and South-East Asia and offers reflections for thinking through the frame of ‘sector transgressions’.
