https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/21/2/1217/7030814?login=false#407650172
The study of regulatory capture is thus the study of the third face of power. One of regulatory capture’s hallmarks is the appearance of consensus or a taken-for-granted quality in which certain social and economic facts resonating with dominant cultural schemas are made legible and commonsensical, while others are obscured. Policymakers consent to corporate policy agendas not through coercion or overt corruption, but through a process in which lobbyists embed themselves in policy networks and extend the ‘public interest’ to incorporate their own interests (Figure 4). While public officials initially had no agenda for grappling with data and digital trade at the start of the Obama Administration—and in fact were pursuing policies that would contradict the digital trade agenda—they came to understand digital trade as a natural extension of ‘normal’ trade policy and pursued a legal order for digital trade. As I show in this article, this legal order developed with technology lobbyists driving every step of the process, from initial policy adoptions to knowledge production, implementation and enforcement.