print“Sovereign Lock-In”:
Mechanisms of Retention in Russian Digital Ecosystems
Stupitskiy A.A.
PhD student, Faculty of Social Sciences, Laboratory of Economic and Sociological Research, HSE University, Moscow, Russia stupitskiy.a.a@hse.ru
The work was carried out within the framework of the Fundamental Research Program of the HSE University.
Stupitskiy A.A. “Sovereign Lock-In”: Mechanisms of Retention in Russian Digital Ecosystems. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2026. No 8. P. 92-105
The classical theory of platforms describes user dependency on digital ecosystems as a rational economic choice: users stay because it is convenient and switching is costly. But what happens when there is nowhere to switch — not because alternatives are less convenient, but because the state has eliminated them? This article introduces the concept of “sovereign lock-in” to describe a regime in which market-based retention mechanisms and state digital sovereignty policy mutually reinforce one another. Drawing on content analysis of corporate documents, industry reports, and regulatory materials across five major Russian digital ecosystems — Sber, Yandex, VK, MTS, and T-Bank — covering the period 2020–2026, the study identifies three mechanisms of user dependency and four dimensions of partner dependency. The analysis shows that after 2022, as a result of sanctions, the departure of international platforms, and the introduction of “white lists” for critical digital infrastructure, the nature of lock-in changed qualitatively: from preferential to structural. Theoretically, the article bridges platform economics, infrastructure studies, and the sociology of markets to argue that Russia represents the clearest case of “sovereign lock-in” among major economies — one in which ecosystem companies are not merely passive beneficiaries of digital sovereignty policy, but active co-authors of the institutional environment that sustains their dominance. The concept of “sovereign lock-in” fills a theoretical gap left by Western platform theory and offers a generalizable framework for analyzing digital ecosystems under managedinternet regimes.
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