Global Tech Law: Infrastructures of digital/AI economy & Society seminar
The seminar investigates how law works in interaction with the digital technologies of contemporary societies – and how to imagine better interactions between law and infrastructure going forward. The Monday sessions introduce the tech, and the Wednesday sessions discuss legal issues this tech poses, attempts to regulate it in different jurisdictions, and the underlying regulatory theories.
Foundational digital technologies we will investigate in this seminar include: the Internet that has enabled global yet uneven data flows based on private standards, hardware (such as cables and routers), and software (such as TCP/IP) and identity and authentication technologies that are designed to ensure “trust” in interactions between digital computers (and the humans behind them). These technologies form the foundation for companies like Google and Meta/Facebook to orchestrate complex targeted advertising ecosystems which involve real-time bidding matching advertisers with eyeballs.
Then, we will delve into the controversial and evolving field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Industrial-scale development of “artificial intelligence” through machine learning has progressed rapidly over the past decade due to massive datasets, availability of open source models, and access to scalable computing power. More recently, large language models (LLMs) / foundation models have enabled “generative AI”, including OpenAI’s GPT. We will delve into contemporary debates about “AI regulation” as exemplified by the US Executive Order on AI, the EU AI Act, and China’s interim measures on generative AI.
Our seminar asks: How are digital infrastructures regulated and how do they regulate?
We propose to “think infrastructurally” about digital technologies. Understood in this way, we analyze assemblages of hardware, software, and data with entangled technical, social, and organizational dimensions. In this way, thinking infrastructurally entails recognizing that infrastructures are more than technical objects (like data centers, fiber-optic cables, or smartphones). Recognizing how technical dimensions of digital infrastructures are entangled with social and organizational norms and practices opens up analytical pathways for questions of governance, including governance through law and not-law. In this context, we will highlight and discuss the salience of “technical” standard-setting and its economics, politics, and values in interaction with law. Thinking infrastructurally also poses critical questions about degradation, repurposing, maintenance, and sustainability.
Throughout the seminar, we compare and contrast analysis of digital infrastructures from the perspective of systems engineering, from the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of infrastructure studies, and from the perspective of regulatory law and theory. Together, we will learn how to productively engage with these different modes of thinking about digital infrastructures and their regulation.
Spring 2024
Mondays and Wednesdays, 7:00-8:30 pm
Instructors: Benedict Kingsbury, David Stein, Thomas Streinz
More information on the NYU Law course website.
This is an extended (three-credit) version of the seminar offered in spring 2023. In spring 2019, Professor Streinz taught the Global Tech Law: Selected Topics Seminar.
