Mutually Assured Education

The White Paper sets out an initial high-level framework for states, policymakers, civil society, workers and others to dismantle Big Tech's concentrated power over digital ecosystems, and to encourage the emergence of a fair digital economy that is open, decentralised, democratic and serves the common good.

The Green Web Foundation tackles "How power consolidation of digital infrastructures threatens our democracies-and what we can do about it"

There is a growing trend for high-status original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as premium electronics manufacturers and premium carmakers to create and capture value through digital extensions of their products. However, these incumbents face disruptive threats from platforms offering substitutes for these digital extensions. The literature suggests that coopetition—the interplay of cooperation and competition—is a viable strategic response to this threat. However, we have a limited understanding of how high-status OEMs coopete with platforms to maintain their digital extensions' edge over time. We address this gap through a longitudinal case study of InnoCar, a premium European carmaker whose digital extensions—car-specific digital services that enhance the driving experience, such as real-time navigation and infotainment—were challenged by Google and Apple. In response, InnoCar pursued what we call the slipstream strategy, which consists of two phases with varying intensities of cooperation and competition. A high-status OEM first increases its cooperation with platforms at the expense of competition in order to establish shared demand-related complementary assets. Second, it focuses on competing with platforms on the quality of its digital extensions while keeping cooperation to a minimum. We develop a conceptual framework that specifies the slipstream strategy and provide boundary conditions for its application. Our paper contributes to research on coopetition with platforms.

Woodrow Hartzog - Industry will take everything it can in developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We will get used to it. This will be done for our benefit. Two of these things are true and one of them is a lie. It is critical that lawmakers identify them correctly. In this Essay, I argue that no matter how AI systems develop, if lawmakers do not address the dynamics of dangerous extraction, harmful normalization, and adversarial self-dealing, then AI systems will likely be used to do more harm than good.

Research on platform owners’ entry into complementary markets points in divergent directions. One strand of the literature reports a squeeze on post-entry complementor profits due to increased competition, while another observes positive effects as increased customer attention and innovation benefit the complementary market as a whole. In this research note, we seek to transcend these conflicting views by comparing the effects of the early and late timing of platform owners’ entry. We apply a difference-in-differences design to explore the drivers and effects of the timing of platform owners’ entry using data from three entries that Amazon made into its Alexa voice assistant’s complementary markets. Our findings suggest that early entry is driven by the motivation to boost the overall value creation of the complementary market, whereas late entry is driven by the motivation to capture value already created in a key complementary market. Importantly, our findings suggest that early entry, in contrast to late entry, creates substantial consumer attention that benefits complementors offering specialized functionality. In addition, the findings also suggest that complementors with more experience are more likely to benefit from the increased consumer attention. We contribute to platform research by showing that the timing of the platform owner’s entry matters in a way that can potentially reconcile conflicting findings regarding the consequences of platform owners’ entry into complementary markets.

There has been an explosion in uses of educational technology (EdTech) to support schools’ teaching, learning, assessment and administration. This article asks whether UK EdTech and data protection policies protect children's rights at school. It adopts a children's rights framework to explore how EdTech impacts children's rights to education, privacy and freedom from economic exploitation, taking Google Classroom as a case study. The research methods integrate legal research, interviews with UK data protection experts and education professionals working at various levels from national to local, and a socio-technical investigation of the flow of children's data through Google Classroom. The findings show that Google Classroom undermines children's privacy and data protection, potentially infringing children's other rights. However, they also show that regulation has impacted on Google's policy and practice. Specifically, we trace how various governments’ deployment of a range of legal arguments has enabled them to regulate Google's relationship with schools to improve its treatment of children's data. Although the UK government has not brought such actions, the data flow investigation shows that Google has also improved its protection of children's data in UK schools as a result of these international actions. Nonetheless, multiple problems remain, due both to Google's non-compliance with data protection regulations and schools’ practices of using Google Classroom. We conclude with a blueprint for the rights-respecting treatment of children's education data that identifies needed actions for the UK Department for Education, data protection authority, and industry, to mitigate against harmful practices and better support schools.

In recent years, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have become three of the dominant developers of AI infrastructures and services. The increasing economic and political power of these companies over the data, computing infrastructures, and AI expertise that play a central role in the development of contemporary AI technologies has led to major concerns among academic researchers, critical commentators, and policymakers addressing their market and monopoly power. Picking up on such macro-level political-economic analyses, this paper more specifically investigates the micro-material ways infrastructural power in AI is operated through the respective cloud AI infrastructures and services developed by their cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Through an empirical analysis of their evolutionary trajectories in the context of AI between January 2017 and April 2021, this paper argues that these cloud platforms attempt to exercise infrastructural power in three significant ways: through vertical integration, their complementary innovation, and the power of abstraction. Each dynamic is strategically mobilised to strengthen these platforms’ dominant position at the forefront of AI development and implementation. This complicates the critical evaluation and regulation of AI technologies by public authorities. At the same time, these forms of infrastructural power in the cloud provide Amazon, Microsoft, and Google with leverage to set the conditions of possibility for future AI production and deployment.

Will policymakers permit an open-source future?

some proposals for the Global Digital Compact (GDC) can be read to mandate more centralized governance. If the final document contains such language, we believe it will be detrimental to not only the Internet and the Web, but also to the world’s economies and societies.

Panelists from the Atlantic Council give a bit of a primer on Internet Governance history, how things changed with the Snowden revelations, the recent push for multilateralism, and how China sees the Global Digital Compact as a way to gain more leverage. (Also some discussion of the Digital Silk Road initiative)

Panelists from the Atlantic Council give a bit of a primer on Internet Governance history, how things changed with the Snowden revelations, the recent push for multilateralism, and how China sees the Global Digital Compact as a way to gain more leverage. (Also some discussion of the Digital Silk Road initiative)

Is Google Search a monopoly with gatekeeping power? Reg-ulators from the US, UK, and Europe have argued that it isbased on the assumption that Google Search dominates themarket for horizontal (a.k.a. “general”) web search. Googledisputes this, claiming that competition extends to all verti-cal (a.k.a. “specialized”) search engines, and that under thismarket definition it does not have monopoly power.In this study we present the first analysis of Google Search’smarket share under vertical segmentation of online search.We leverage observational trace data collected from a panelof US residents that includes their web browsing history andcopies of the Google Search Engine Result Pages they wereshown. We observe that participants’ search sessions begin atGoogle greater than 50% of the time in 24 out of 30 verticalmarket segments (which comprise almost all of our partic-ipants’ searches). Our results inform the consequential andongoing debates about the market power of Google Searchand the conceptualization of online markets in general

Delineating a robust investment matrix in the AI start-up ecosystem from 1907 to 2024, this paper highlights key financiers like Sequoia Capital and Softbank. Dominant sectors receiving support include Biotechnology, Cloud Computing, and Generative AI, with a noticeable trend toward Web3 and NLP technologies. The network map emphasizes the dynamic interplay between established venture groups, accelerators, and government-backed entities, underscoring their vital role in nurturing innovation within this high-growth industry.

This document examines the potential of collective internet frameworks, contrasting the privatized model with past initiatives like Cybersyn, and explores their implications for current socio-technical architectures. The author critiques the naturalization of individualized internet interaction, advocating for alternative, socially-driven network topologies and practices that prioritize collective empowerment over market determinism.

how vital it is to expand our discipline’s focus beyond technological minutia and see the wider background affected by our work. In this regard, the lenses of economics, sociology, political science, and other social sciences are necessary. In particular, power as an analytic category is especially valuable for understanding the relationship between computing and the rest of society.

This paper then presented an expanded categorization of academic computing that legitimates both internal critique and a broader concern for the public interest as constitutive aspects of academic computing.

This would mean breaking from our almost single-minded focus within computing education on how to improve student learning of the technical aspects of computing (especially first-year programming), and instead recognize that encouraging a critical stance towards their discipline is just as important.

The paper ends with some Judith Butler quotes. Let the Butlerian Jihad commence!

In this paper, we discuss the role competition law can play in safeguarding the democratic ideal. We do so against the background of the tech-driven decline of democracy that can be witnessed around the globe.

Democratic governance is anchored in the principle that power is vested in the people, and that people can choose wisely. Citizens must benefit from an undistorted flow of relevant information that allows them to exercise their autonomous choices as citizens and voters. Despite the many benefits that the digital era has brought to users, it has also opened the door to increased manipulation, misinformation, and distortions in the marketplace of ideas. Can competition law be part of the solution to these issues?

We begin our discussion with an illustration of the way in which the digital economy contributes to distortions in the marketplace of ideas. We look at the ways in which digital platforms have created power imbalances that distort competition, autonomy, and the market for ideas, and how the value chains underlying their business models easily lead to this outcome.

We then reflect on the positioning of the democratic ideal in relation to antitrust enforcement, noting two opposing endpoints of integration: the ‘competition dynamic’ approach that views democracy as a valuable incidental outcome of effective competition enforcement, and the ‘integrated’ approach, which argues for democracy to form an internal substantive benchmark of competition assessments. In between these two endpoints, we position a third model to which we refer as the ‘external benchmark’ approach to democratic antitrust. That approach imports relevant external benchmarks which could be used to assess harm to democracy, without directly changing the traditional intervention benchmarks. It is anchored in developments of European case law, and in particular the recent Court of Justice judgment in Meta Platforms v Bundeskartellamt (2023). We elaborate on this model, its application and usefulness.

With the year 2024 being an important election year throughout the world, the ‘external benchmark’ approach may offer a path through which competition law could rise to the challenge and protect the marketplace of ideas in 2024 and beyond.

To address concerns about the competitive dynamics of digital markets, the promotion of interoperability has been often pointed out as a fundamental component of policy reform agendas. In the case of mobile ecosystems, the smooth and seamless availability of interoperability features is crucial as third-party devices and apps would be otherwise unable to effectively work and participate within the ecosystems. However, access to application programming interfaces (APIs) may be restricted due to privacy, security, or technical constraints. Further, an ecosystem orchestrator may misuse its rule-setting role to pursue anticompetitive goals by restricting or degrading interoperability for third-party services and devices. The paper aims at investigating whether and how effective interoperability could be achieved through the enforcement of competition rules or whether it would require regulatory interventions, such as those envisaged in the European Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Recently, several private and political cloud initiatives emerged in Europe. This paper demonstrates how the sociotechnical imaginaries of three European cloud projects reveal a performative coupling of innovation and political ideas of control, territoriality and sovereignty. I ascertain three elements of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (innovation, boundary making and material properties) guiding the empirical analysis. Taking technology in the making and its role in (geo)politics seriously, this paper shows how imaginaries shape and interact with current geostrategic and political developments in Europe. The analysis of Microsoft’s cloud, Bundescloud and GAIA-X reveals that rising privacy and data security issues have been integrated into cloud imaginaries that traditionally highlight progress and innovation. More specifically, state actors and cloud providers link and sometimes merge allegedly opposing technological aspects of innovation and politicised ideas of control such as digital sovereignty. This shift constitutes a move towards erecting political borders and localising IT within a global infrastructure.

On 28 September 2022, the European Commission released its long-awaited proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Liability Directive (AILD). In contrast to the high expectations on providing a harmonised liability framework for the damage caused by AI systems, the proposed AILD only proposes minimum harmonised procedural rules to facilitate evidence disclosure and alleviate the burden of proof undertaken by claimants. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the proposed AILD and points out the problems when implementing the proposed rules. This article argues that the AILD may never reach its full potential as its name indicates. The fragmentation among Member States regarding the substantive matters may preclude the AILD from moving a step further for harmonising substantial issues. While a comprehensive risk regulation (the EU AI Act) must be followed by an effective remedy mechanism, the proposed AILD will not fill this gap in the short run.

Eric Goldman

I delivered this talk as the 2024 Nies Lecture at Marquette University School of Law, Milwaukee, WI. The talk compares the recent proliferation of Generative AI with the Internet’s proliferation in the mid-1990s. In each case, it was clear that the technology would have revolutionary but uncertain impacts on society. However, the public sentiments toward the two innovations have differed radically. The Internet arrived during a period of widespread techno-optimism, creating a regulatory environment that fostered the Internet’s growth. Generative AI, in contrast, has arrived during widespread techno-pessimism and following decades of conditioning about the dangers of “AI.” The difference is consequential: The prevailing regulatory and legal responses to Generative AI will limit or even negate its benefits. If society hopes to achieve the full potential of Generative AI, we’ll need to adopt a new regulatory approach quickly.

An exploration by Hélène Landemore of what democracy can look like if we move beyond the conceptual limitations of the eighteenth century. Very applicable today, and on the Internet.

Carliss Baldwin, Eric von Hippel

In this paper, we assess the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single-user individuals or firms and open collaborative innovation. We analyze the design costs and architectures and communication costs associated with each model. We conclude that both innovation by individual users and open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with and may displace producer innovation in many parts of the economy. We explain why this represents a paradigm shift with respect to innovation research, policy making, and practice. We discuss important implications and offer suggestions for further research.