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Digital Infrastructure Regulation (LAW-DS-DINFRA-25)

LAW-DS-DINFRA-25

Description

European society in the 2020s has become dependent on various, entangled digital infrastructures, including “cloud computing”, “artificial intelligence”, and “social media”. However, calling these different socio-technical arrangements “infrastructures” is not doing much, if any, analytical work.

In contrast, this seminar seeks to inquire what it might mean to regulate digital infrastructures as infrastructures. In this spirit, this seminar will discuss carefully selected topics of digital infrastructure regulation. It provides a basic introduction to core insights from regulatory theory by inquiring into the “who”, “what”, “how”, and “why” of infrastructure regulation and by probing the distinctiveness of digital infrastructures (as opposed to non-digital ones).

Questions covered include: How to conceptualize a digital infrastructure as a regulatory object? How to address information asymmetries in highly distributed digital infrastructures? How to determine human and machine identities online? And finally: Which digital infrastructures could render regulation more effective?

The seminar draws on some ideas from last spring’s “thinking infrastructurally” seminar, but there is no substantive overlap and the angle is different: While “thinking infrastructurally” was mostly geared towards conceptual and methodological questions at the intersection of law and infrastructure studies (generally), “digital infrastructure regulation” is focused on concrete regulatory design questions posed by certain digital infrastructures to practice infrastructural thinking.

Attendance and active participation are required. Each session will invite you to apply the insights from the readings to your own project.

Course reading list: https://readinglist.eui.eu/leganto/public/39EUI_INST/lists/2958314090008406?auth=SAML&idpCode=SAML_LEGANTO

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 22 to 26 September 2025

 

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