188th Nexa Wednesday - Technology Regulation and the Challenge of Infrastructural Power

Описание: The emergence of networked digital technologies has catalyzed a transformation in political economy, organized around networked, programmable, platformized digital infrastructures and supply chains.

Such infrastructures represent a novel mode of power that has presented thorny conceptual and practical challenges for political regimes of all persuasions. In part, this is because networked digital infrastructures are privately controlled and operate at very large scales, but even if such environments were to be publicly built and operated, their operations would resist conventional modes of political and bureaucratic control and accountability.

Understanding infrastructural power is a necessary first step to developing more effective governance institutions.


JULIE E. COHEN is the Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology and a faculty co-director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. She teaches and writes about surveillance, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, information platforms, and the ways that networked information and communication technologies are reshaping legal institutions. She is the author of Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019) and a co-principal investigator on the Redesigning the Governance Stack project.