content takedown and user data requests to digital intermediaries. At the same time, South Asia faces a significant lack of investment from major tech companies—a challenge common to many Global Majority countries—while CSOs continue to face systemic obstacles and deliberate efforts to undermine their work. This lack of regional cooperation has led to a contagion effect, where emerging markets in South Asia are implicitly compelled to adopt governance frameworks and regulations set by dominant markets, primarily in Australia, Canada, the European Union (EU), and the United States. This alignment is often appealing to both private and public stakeholders, as it promotes global standardization, facilitates intergovernmental oversight, and enhances the attractiveness of local markets for foreign investment and expansion. The most notable example of this phenomenon is the Brussels Effect—the EU’s ability to shape global markets through its own regulatory policies (Bradford, 2020). Given the EU’s economic influence, companies operating within its jurisdiction must comply with its standards, adjusting their production, manufacturing, and deployment practices accordingly. To minimize costs and avoid the complexity of designing specialized products for different markets, businesses often opt to apply EU standards uniformly across their entire global product output. Foreign investors with significant stakes in EU markets are incentivized to align with its regulations, and policymakers in other countries frequently adopt EU standards as a model for their own governance frameworks. A key example of this is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has become one of the most influential global benchmarks for data protection, shaping regulatory approaches in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Similar patterns can be observed elsewhere, such as the Washington Effect, which has influenced policies on platform accountability and content moderation. These theories of geopolitical and economic influence assume a standardized approach to governance, overlooking the sociocultural particularities of individual contexts and opting out of these global regulatory frameworks carries significant risks, including potential withdrawal of funding from intergovernmental organizations that support civil society and public initiatives. These global contagion effects are also evident in more localized settings. India, for instance, exemplifies what might be termed the Delhi Effect—a regional spillover influenced by shared legal traditions among former British colonies where its digital priorities shape the technology policies of neighboring 7