Anchi Cao is a second-year MPhil candidate in Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. His research examines the political economy of data intermediaries and their positionality across digital capitalism, with a current focus on the structural limits of data brokers across different digital economies. He holds an LLB in Diplomacy and a BA in French Studies from China Foreign Affairs University, graduating with distinction and a national scholarship. Anchi has worked with Plug and Play China on cross-border innovation, the International Telecommunication Union’s AI for Good team, and as a research associate at Tsinghua University’s Institute of AI International Governance.

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Cyberspace today is marked by cyber disorder: pervasive surveillance, collapsing privacy regimes, and fragmented governance. Within this turbulent landscape, data brokers occupy an ambiguous role. They are often portrayed as powerful engines of surveillance capitalism, yet their operations are also the natural outgrowth of routine data-driven practices such as profiling, segmentation, and risk assessment. The puzzle—and the entry point of this study—is that data brokers sit at the heart of the data economy but lack the durable power usually associated with intermediaries.

The article makes three moves. First, it revisits the theoretical assumptions about brokerage. Traditional brokers in finance or commodities derived power from information asymmetry and gatekeeping functions. Contemporary theories of platforms, surveillance capitalism, assetisation, and networks similarly predict that data brokers should consolidate influence through aggregation and intermediation. Yet the empirical record reveals the opposite: brokers remain fragmented, marginal, and structurally constrained.

Second, the article identifies three mechanisms of powerlessness. Data brokers are “brokers without brokerage”: their products are non-exclusive, easily substitutable, and tethered to one-sided market relationships, undermining scarcity and leverage. They are confined to niche specialisations while Big Tech monopolises data circulation, leaving brokers as subordinate actors with low margins. And they face legal cornering, subject to national security scrutiny and public backlash without the lobbying capacity or end-user legitimacy of larger platforms. Together, these conditions render brokers central yet fragile: indispensable to data circulation but unable to consolidate either market or political power.

Third, the article argues that this fragility creates a governance opportunity. Rather than treating brokers as rogue actors to be eliminated, policymakers could reposition them as accountable infrastructures. Four pathways are proposed: brokers as utilities with exclusive rights and obligations; as licensed intermediaries supporting the release of public data assets for societal use; as asset stewards managing data capitalisation for corporate actors without monopolising distribution; and as trusted spaces offering transparent, secure processing environments. Comparative trajectories suggest distinct models of broker governance: punitive oversight with utility potential in the U.S.; emerging data-altruism and trusted-space frameworks in the EU; and hybrid utility–space arrangements in China.

The article concludes that reordering broker governance is a test case for taming cyber disorder. By harnessing brokers’ structural weaknesses, regulators can transform intermediaries once assumed predatory into governable nodes of accountability and efficiency. In this way, data brokers shift from symptoms of surveillance capitalism to potential levers for a more equitable and stable digital order.