Digital corporations are, unsurprisingly, giants—and often vertically integrated ones at that. They’re known for creating new products and markets only to dominate them soon after. Critics argue that these companies reached such colossal size by bending traditional antitrust principles. In a notable shift toward a more interventionist antitrust approach, the Biden administration has taken on several of these tech behemoths, especially Google and Facebook. Professor Daniel Francis of NYU Law will join us to unpack the last four years of tech antitrust and shed light on what lies ahead.

Several of the world’s biggest digital corporations and most innovative digital technologies are Chinese. Given China’s political economy and system of governance, the regulatory approach towards digital corporations as well as the structure and practice of these digital corporations markedly differs from that of US companies. Professor Angela Zhang of the University of Southern California offers a deep dive into the Chinese regulatory model and Chinese digital economics more generally.

Regulating digital constellations often comes with much normative fanfare but little technical and infrastructural realism. What sounds nice on paper often proves extremely difficult to implement in existing technological and infrastructural set ups. Can data verifiably be ‘localized’? Can large language models ‘understand’ ethics? Many prominent policy proposals hardly withstand scrutiny from an infrastructural perspective. In turn, how does existing digital infrastructure impact regulatory path-dependencies? And, crucially, can we conceptualize (control over) infrastructure itself as a form of regulation of human behavior?

These and more questions are at the center of the guest lecture by Professor Thomas Streinz of the European University Institute.

Digital Corporations are, first and foremost, organizations. Pretty big ones too. They develop their own esprit des corps, bureaucratize in peculiar ways, and function along vectors not immediately intelligible to the outside observer. Digital corporations are the key transmitter for external feedback and policy input. Therefore, to regulate and improve the informational economy we must better understand the organizational reality of digital corporations. This guest lecture takes a closer look at how these organizational features intersect with efforts to advance privacy.

Professor Ari Ezra Waldman of the University of California, Irvine shares insights from years of fieldwork, especially on the influence of organizational patterns on the handling of privacy at digital corporations.

This session of the Guarini Colloquium will discuss how to regulate online disinformation and misinformation. We will be joined by Oreste Pollicino (Bocconi University; Senior Emile Noel Fellow, NYU Law), who will present his draft paper (with Giovanni De Gregorio) "A Constitutional Deal to Address Online Disinformation".

This session of the Guarini Colloquium provides an introduction into regulatory efforts in the EU, US, and China to address societal concerns arising from the rapid development and deployment of “artificial intelligence” by global digital corporations.

We will be joined by Nathalie Smuha, Emile Noel Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center at NYU Law, who will discuss current developments in global AI regulation (including the EU's AI Act) on the basis of her article "From a ‘race to AI’ to a ‘race to AI regulation’: regulatory competition for artificial intelligence".

How does China regulate its Big Tech companies? This question has profound implications for Chinese businesses and international investors. Since October 2020, Beijing has enacted a dizzying array of regulatory measures against Chinese tech firms in areas ranging from antitrust to data and labor regulation. This massive regulatory campaign started with the demise of Ant Group’s initial public offering (IPO) and has since expanded to a wide range of industries—from fintech and e-commerce to social media, food delivery, ride-hailing, and even tutoring.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium, we will discuss how to analyze these regulatory developments from domestic and global perspectives, based on the theoretical framework developed by Angela Zhang in her forthcoming book: “High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy” (OUP 2024, forthcoming).

In his new paper, Alexandre de Streel contrasts the Internet libertarian John-Perry Barlow's famous "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from 1996 with the European Union's "Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade" from 2022 and the "Declaration on the Future of the Internet", which has been signed by more than 70 countries.

To ensure that platforms comply with those newly affirmed EU digital rights and principles, the EU adopted in 2022 two important laws: the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aim to increase contestability and fairness in EU digital markets, thereby contributing to the freedom of choice,  and the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to reduce illegal (and to a lesser extend harmful) content and products on the Internet.

In his paper, Alexandre de Streel asks whether the new EU laws will be better than a cyberspace left alone, focusing on the Digital Markets Act. He analyzes the nature of the DMA (building on earlier work with Pierre Larouche) and shows that it is a pro-competitive regulation which aims to create, in the words of Barlow, ‘a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by economic power’. He then goes on to analyze whether the DMA could lead to an Internet renaissance.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we will be joined by Professor de Streel to discuss his new paper.

In her new book (forthcoming with OUP in September 2023), Anu Bradford examines the efforts of the EU, US, and China to regulate the digital economy. She argues that there are three dominant regulatory models that most countries organize their regulatory regimes around. These models reflect different theories about the relationship between markets, the state, and individual and collective rights, and can be loosely captured by the regulatory philosophies embraced by the US, China, and the EU, respectively. These different views on how to regulate the digital economy involve contested societal choices and rest on different economic theories, political ideologies, and cultural identities. In making those choices, governments are forced to balance their support of innovation with the need to consider the implications of technology for civil liberties, the distribution of wealth, international trade, and national security, to name a few.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we will be joined by Professor Bradford to discuss her new book “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology”.

How do authoritarian states build the legal infrastructure of private law necessary to support efficient markets? This is the question that Lizhi Liu and Barry Weingast ask in their paper, Law, Chinese Style: Solving the Authoritarian’s legal Dilemma though the Private Provision of Law. Liu and Weingast hypothesize that authoritarians typically undersupply this infrastructure due to an “authoritarian’s legal dilemma”: how to create a judiciary that would supply and only supply private law. If a judiciary is sufficiently strong and independent to support private law, it cannot credibly commit not to constrain the autocrat by strengthening public law (e.g., citizen rights, constitution). They argue that China has devised a novel solution to this dilemma: partially outsourcing the provision of private law to key private actors. In China’s 700-million-user e-commerce market, online trading platforms (e.g.,Taobao) have privately supplied strong legal infrastructure to enforce contracts, prevent fraud, and settle disputes. Such platforms both enforce and create private law through rule experimentation. They suggest this digital route to legal development maybe politically viable and potentially generalizable to other states.

Guarini Global Law & Tech welcomed Lizhi Liu (Georgetown University) to the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations to discuss her paper.

In her new book, Alibaba: Infrastructuring Global China (Routledge 2021), Hong Shen examines the political-economic dynamics in the development of a leading global Internet giant: Alibaba. As both a prominent example of, as well as providing the basic infrastructure for, China’s outward expansion, Alibaba demonstrates the complex interplay between different state agencies and units of capital in the context of the rise of global China. Hong Shen investigates the development and expansions of Alibaba and discusses how Alibaba has not only become a leader of China’s increasingly globalizing internet but has also increasingly served as a basic infrastructure model for other Chinese companies to go global. Shen also addresses how this process has been constantly shaped and reshaped by complex state-capital interactions along the way. Her book shows how different units of capital, both inside and outside of China, have interacted with Alibaba’s developmental strategies and illustrates how different state agencies, both domestic and international, have enabled or constrained the company’s development, especially its global expansion.

Hong Shen joined this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations to discuss Alibaba’s role in China’s digital economy and beyond.

Governments around the world are considering ways of regulating platform companies and platform power. Advanced examples of such regulations are the EU’s recent proposals to introduce regulations to govern the single market for digital services (Digital Services Act) and to ensure contestable and fair markets in the digital sector more broadly (Digital Markets Act). These proposals present solutions while also raising important questions: what regulatory problems are these proposals trying to solve? How are they going to affect Google and other global digital corporations?

Alexandre de Streel joined the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations to discuss these EU proposals, building on his research in this space.

In April 2021, the European Commission proposed a Regulation on Artificial Intelligence, known as the AI Act. In their recent paper, Michael Veale and Frederike Zuiderveen Borgesius present an overview of the Act and analyze its implications, drawing on scholarship ranging from the study of contemporary AI practices to the structure of EU product safety regimes over the last four decades. In their view, aspects of the AI Act, such as different rules for different risk-levels of AI, make sense. But they also find that some provisions of the proposal have surprising legal implications, whilst others may be largely ineffective at achieving their stated goals. Several overarching aspects, including the enforcement regime and the risks of maximum harmonization pre-empting legitimate national AI policy, engender significant concern. They argue that these issues should be addressed as a priority in the legislative process.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we were joined by Michael Veale to discuss the EU proposal for an AI Act with our students and other participants.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we welcomed Mary Anne Franks to discuss reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act with our students and other participants.

Should platforms should be responsible for user-generated content? If so, under what circumstances? What exactly would such responsibility look like? These are the questions that Mary Anne Franks asks in her paper with Danielle Citron titled “The Internet As a Speech Machine and Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform”. They encourage reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—a provision originally designed to encourage tech companies to clean up “offensive” online content—arguing that the public discourse around Section 230 is riddled with misconceptions.

In this session of the Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations, we discussed Elettra Bietti’s paper with our students and other participants.

In her paper, which is available on SSRN, Elettra Bietti develops a genealogy of the disagreements that have emerged around the notion of digital platform power and the conflicting regulatory proposals these disagreements have led to. She traces these debates’ roots to earlier 1990s debates about Internet regulation: contestations around the meaning of freedom, law, power and democracy in digital spaces. In particular, she isolates three paradigmatic views, or moments, in early Internet regulation discourse. First, anarcho-libertarian views portray the Internet as an autonomous and utopian sphere of free social interaction immune from external interferences from the state or the law. Second, liberal views include a number of different perspectives. Most notably, Joel Reidenberg and Lawrence Lessig developed the idea that code is law, that law and behavior-modifying regulation exist in digital environments, but that they manifest in different ways, most effectively through architectural and material means. Finally, a small group of critical thinkers questioned prevalent (anarcho-libertarian and liberal) understandings of cyberspace, showing that many of these views eluded the way power and commercial logics manifested and in practice governed the Internet.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Lina Khan to discuss her path-breaking work on platform power.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Daphne Keller, Stanford Law School, to discuss her path-breaking work on platform content regulation and a draft paper on regulating algorithmic amplification.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Frank Pasquale to discuss chapter 5 (Machines Judging Humans) of his book New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Anupam Chander to discuss the TikTok case and its implications for Internet governance.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Pamela Samuelson to discuss her paper (with Kathryn Hashimoto) “The Enigma of Digitized Property: A Tribute to John Perry Barlow”. Christopher Sprigman provided comment.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Kate Klonick to discuss her paper “Inventing Global Governance for Online Speech: The Development of Facebook's Oversight Board”.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Winston Ma, Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU Law and Former Managing Director, China Investment Corp (CIC) to discuss China’s Digital Silk Road, the global digital economy, and global data law.

The Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations welcomed Eyal Benvenisti, Whewell Professor of international law and director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at Cambridge University, to discuss his paper “An AI for an AI - Toward Algorithmic Checks and Balances”.

The Guarini Colloquium: International Law of Global Digital Corporations welcomed Scott Hemphill, Professor of Law at NYU Law, to discuss his paper on ‘disruptive monopolists’.

The Guarini Colloquium: International Law of Global Digital Corporations welcomed Lisa Austin, Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, to discuss her paper, co-authored with David Lie, on ‘safe sharing sites’. A revised version has been published by the NYU Law Review.

The Guarini Colloquium: International Law of Global Digital Corporations welcomed Julie E. Cohen, Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown Law, to discuss chapter 7 (“The New Networked Governance Institutions”) of her book “Between Truth and Power: Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism” which was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press and is now available under a CC-NC-SA license.