Mutually Assured Education

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.

From The Syllabus:

Developing the concept of "neo-illiberalism" in the context of neoliberal economics and illiberal nationalism, our hidden gem of the week explores how EU platform regulation prioritizes corporations over human rights.

This article takes as its subject the growth of "governance beyond the state." It highlights the problems resulting from the large number of organizations, networks and practices which are making authorita- tive rules and policies outside the state, and which lie beyond the control of nationaldemocratic and consti- tutional structures. Having set out the double dilemma posed by the rapid growth of transnational governance and its problematic relationship to democracy, the article criticizes existing approaches to the dilemma. The dominant current perspective, which I label the "compensatory approach," takes the view that democracy cannot be transposedfrom the national to the transnationalarena, and that other compensatory mechanisms must be found to regulate transnationalgovernance. I take issue with the general consensus that democratization of transnational governance is not plausible ,and I argue that any convincing attempt to reform transnational governance must contend with the democracy problem. Although our contemporary understanding of the concept of democracy is closely tied to the state context, I argue that we should not jettison democratic ideals when attempting to design more legitimate governance structures beyond the state. Rather, we should acknowedge the powerful normative and social appeal of democracy as a governing ideal, try to identify its co ceptual "building blocks," and think about the possible design of legitimate democracy-oriented governance processes beyond and between states.

In this spirit, the article proposes an approach to transnational governance which I call the democratic-striving approach. To ensure the public-oriented nature of norms and policies, this approach is built on one particular building-block of democracy: the fullest possible participation and representation of those affected. To illustrate the general argument in more concrete terms, the article draws on the example of the InternationalFinancialInstitutions and the recent reform of their development-assistance policies, known as the Poverty Strategy Reduction Program. The example demonstrates the practical potential of the democratic-striving approach for the reform of transnational governance, and suggests that it could be applied to many other instances of governance beyond the state.

Decentralization is a term widely used in a variety of contexts, particularly in political science and discourses surrounding the Internet. It is popular today among advocates of blockchain technology. While frequently employed as if it were a technical term, decentralization more reliably appears to operate as a rhetorical strategy that directs attention toward some aspects of a proposed social order and away from others. It is called for far more than it is theorized or consistently defined. This non- specificity has served to draw diverse participants into common political and technological projects. Yet even the most apparently decentralized systems have shown the capacity to produce economically and structurally centralized outcomes. The rhetoric of decentralization thus obscures other aspects of the re-ordering it claims to describe. It steers attention from where concentrations of power are operating, deferring worthwhile debate about how such power should operate. For decentralization to be a reliable concept in formulating future social arrangements and related technologies, it should come with high standards of specificity. It also cannot substitute for anticipating centralization with appropriate mechanisms of accountability.

It is not self promotion if I do it instead of @[email protected] right?

When the P2B Regulation1 became applicable on 12 July 2020, it was the first horizontal framework for the platform economy in the European Union (EU). However, the new Regulation was not met with great fanfare. Some commentators dismissed the P2B Regulation as lacking ambition and criticized that one could actually see that it had been put together rather quickly.2 The wider public hardly took any notice of the arrival of the P2B Regulation. Maybe it was just bad timing. Amid a global pandemic, digital platforms were seen as a solution rather than a problem as much of our lives went online. Since then, public opinion on tech enterprises has evolved and the EU has enacted with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) one of the world’s most ambitious regulatory frameworks for the platform economy.

However, while the DMA has been heralded as the most sweeping legislation to regulate tech since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),3 the P2B Regulation continues to struggle with visibility. The European Commission’s first preliminary review of the Regulation in September 2023 highlighted that ‘awareness among business users and online intermediation services is insufficient’.4 To some extent, this could be attributed to the overshadowing presence of the DMA and DSA. When the Commission published their proposals for the DMA and DSA in December 2020—less than 6 months after the P2B Regulation had become applicable—all political (and most scholarly) attention focused on the twin Regulations. From this perspective, the P2B Regulation could be seen as an ephemeral and insignificant precursor to the DMA and DSA, which became obsolete when the latter two regulations came into force.

Abstract: The adoption of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) has changed the regulatory landscape for the digital sector in Europe and beyond. The DMA amounts to a complete system of ex ante rules that provide for a specific clausus numerus of obligations and prohibitions and aims at fostering contestability and fairness in the area of large digital platforms. The DMA is ostensibly not competition law, since it functions ex ante and not ex post, but in reality, it is very much influenced by competition law and, therefore, is very much seen as the ex ante side of the same coin, the other side of the coin being the ex post competition rules. Like in competition law, the question of private enforcement takes a central role in the overall system of enforcement. The purpose of the present article is to shed light on the private enforcement of the DMA rules. In particular, it deals, first, with the preliminary question, i.e. that the enforcement of the DMA is not restricted to public authorities (the European Commission) but is also enforced by the courts in civil law disputes between private parties. Second, it considers the questions of available remedies in private enforcement, the applicable procedural rules and the rules on jurisdiction and conflict of laws (private international law). Finally, it centres on risks of fragmentation and the DMA mechanisms to remedy this problem.

(Reproducing this from Fission Talk)

Below I will add in my condensed chapter notes. Each chapter is available as its own paper on the book website 1 if you want to just pick and choose. Many of these chapters were presented as papers at the Internet Governance Forum in 2022.

Here is the TOC for your reference:

This article delves into Google’s dominance of the browser market, highlighting how Google’s Chrome browser is playing a critical role in asserting Google’s dominance in other markets.

Abstract

Because private companies now control the most prominent communication platforms, the most pressing question in the field of content moderation is how to ensure that the governance of public discourse responds to public values. The prevailing approach, given that the state cannot regulate speech directly, is that state regulation can be substituted with audited self-regulation, broad stakeholder participation, and negotiated rulemaking. In this model, which this article refers to as the “new governance model for content moderation,” companies include advocates as representatives of the public in their processes to govern online speech. Ideally, they negotiate policy goals and share responsibility for achieving them. The end goal is to have a process in which public values are given effect. This article argues, however, that this governance model is unsound in both theory and practice. In the field of content moderation, the ambition of constructing public values through a collaborative process between companies and stakeholders is conceptually incoherent: those interests that cannot elicit the cooperation from corporate actors and are not consistent with the values of participating advocates are excluded by design. In practice, no present or past demonstrations have shown that the inclusion of advocates in speech governance and the agreements they reach with companies have epistemic credibility to construct the public interest. Though those flaws might seem unsurprising, scholars and activists double down on independence, diversity, and expertise as design strategies that can result in self-regulatory bodies that could adequately set policy goals. This article advocates for pluralism as a framework that more effectively achieves the participatory goals of new governance. It argues that the state has a central role to play in creating a plural and contested public sphere. A robust legal system can complement self-regulation and push it structurally in the direction of public values.

“The politics of digital policymaking is no longer primarily characterised by the ‘low-politics’ of regulatory governance; it is also profoundly influenced by the ‘high politics’ of geopolitical rivalry.”

Critical look at the Human Rights Protocol Considerations effort in the IRTF; argues that you can't embed human rights in technology without considering the specific context of use.

(individual chapter downloads)

This sprawling work from Carliss Baldwin covers modularity theory, the relationship between technology and organisations, standards and open source, all with an economic lens. Big but worth it; volume one serves as grounding in modularity and topics surrounding it.