Guarini Colloquium:
Regulating Global Digital Corporations

What law applies to Google?

Who should own .AMAZON?

Do we need a new Digital Geneva Convention?

Global digital corporations (e.g. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter) have played leading roles in shaping the transnational digital order, enabled by light regulation and robust liability protection in the US. Their platforms make rules and their lobbying has influenced both national regulators and international treaty negotiators. US companies are encountering increasing regulatory pushback, especially in the EU with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), new platform regulation in form of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). As the political environment in the US is changing, a new transatlantic regulatory discourse is emerging. The EU and the US are increasingly positioning themselves vis-a-vis China, the home of several world-leading digital economy companies (e.g. Alibaba, Bytedance, Huawei, Tencent), which operate successfully in many emerging economies but are confronted with an increasingly challenging regulatory environment in the US and at home. In recent years, Chinese legislative authorities have enacted numerous new rules covering areas such as antitrust, data and labor protection, while regulatory agencies have significantly stepped up their enforcement efforts aimed at tech companies.

We begin with seminar sessions that discuss the Internet’s technological foundations, infrastructure, and governance, focusing on global corporations’ role in each of these. We then canvas established legal concepts and novel ideas about platform regulation in global contexts in Colloquium sessions with invited speakers from policy, industry, and academia. We close with discussions about the role of lawyers and lawyering within global digital corporations.

The course deals with a rapidly changing and very complex technological and economic environment. The objective for the course is to equip students with the basic knowledge, core concepts, and versatile tools necessary to think critically and creatively about how to regulate global digital corporations going forward.

Fall 2023
Mondays, 4:45-6:45 PM
Instructors: Thomas Streinz, Joseph H. H. Weiler, and Angela Zhang.
More information on the NYU Law course website.

This Colloquium originated in Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) Colloquia on “The International Law of Google: Digital Economy Companies and Transnational Legal Orders” in spring 2017 and spring 2018. Since Fall 2018 Benedict Kingsbury, Thomas Streinz, and Joseph H. H. Weiler have each year convened the semester-long Guarini Colloquium: Regulating Global Digital Corporations.