The global city is conventionally defined as a central hub in a network of flowsof capital, people, goods, and images. However, if we shift our focus away from the formal indicators of economic power and towards the grey and black economies, we encounter a rather different map of global connectivity and cultural provision. The chapter considers the relationship between informal media distribution and formal cultural policy, with reference to circuits of media piracy in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Long concerned with studying government support for and regulation of the arts, cultural policy analysis is undergoing a reorientation as scholars turn their attention towards entanglements of the governmental and the cultural that take place outside the realm of policy per se. As the gap widens between the 'cultural sector' (museums, galleries, libraries, heritage institutions and arts organizations) and everyday sites of cultural engagement (from football fields to Facebook), new directions for cultural policy analysis are emerging. One indicator of this shift is The International Journal of Cultural Policy's recent decision to complement its ongoing analysis of arts and culture policies with a focus on 'implicit' cultural management operating outside the realm of formal state programs. 1 For IJCP, there is something to be gained from 'reaching back behind the contemporary coining of the term 'cultural policy' to explore how sets of policies that could not be thematized in these terms can nevertheless be usefully understood as implicit forms of cultural policy' (Ahearne, 2009: 147). We can therefore add to the now-familiar list of objects of cultural policy analysis (arts and culture ministries, public service broadcasters, performing arts companies, heritage organisations) an array of other actors including religious institutions, media corporations, non-governmental organizations and industry bodies. This chapter is similarly concerned with implicit policy, by which I mean regulation, prohibition, subsidy and management that does not form part of official public policy programs. I want to push this line of enquiry a little further, however, by considering systems of regulation in informal rather than formal