The book’s overall conclusion summarizes the argument advanced in this book. Despite advancing a theory that utilizes security practice to achieve security as a state of being, it ends on a cautionary note. To wit, although we have established the existence of mandatory securitization, the same should not be considered a ready-made solution to the world ills but rather a necessary evil in an insecure world. The conclusion argues that decision-makers concerned with improving the world should ultimately concern themselves with eradicating the sources of insecurity and not with fighting fires.

Chapter 2 explores the Ecuadorean rainforest landscape, its inhabitants, and their first interactions with the oil industry before large-scale oil extraction started in the late 1960s. It starts by looking back at the millennia of gradual changes when the history of crude oil and the tropical rainforest environment started to intersect. An exploration of the geographical properties of the Amazon landscapes, as well as their flora and fauna including human inhabitants, visualizes the lively environment encountered by the first oilmen visiting the area in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s. Two multinational oil companies, the Leonard Exploration Company and Shell, undertook major efforts to discover petroleum reserves in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Even though their exploration programs failed in the end, their pioneering work of mapping and surveying the rainforest and its subsoil laid the foundation for large-scale petroleum extraction decades later.

Until recently, those wanting to escape the effects of terrestrial light pollution could leave cities and travel to the countryside to observe the night sky. But increasingly there is nowhere, and therefore no way, to escape the pollution from the thousands of satellites being launched each year. ‘Mega-constellations’ composed of thousands or even tens of thousands of satellites are designed to provide low-cost, low-latency, high-bandwidth Internet around the world. This chapter outlines how the application of the ‘consumer electronic product model’ to satellites could lead to multiple tragedies of the commons, from the loss of access to certain orbits because of space debris, to changes to the chemistry of Earth’s upper atmosphere, to increased dangers on Earth’s surface from re-entered satellite components. Mega-constellations require a shift in perspectives and policies. Instead of looking at single satellites, we need to evaluate systems of thousands of satellites, launched by multiple states and companies, all operating within a shared ecosystem.

The rapid development of mega-constellations raises difficult issues of international law, including liability for collisions involving satellites. Establishing ‘causation’ – that the actions of one satellite operator caused a specific collision with another space object and resulted in damage – could be a challenge, especially in the context of knock-on collisions where debris from an initial collision later collides with one or more spacecraft, including satellites. A further challenge is determining, in the absence of binding international rules on the design and operation of satellites, what is ‘reasonable’ behaviour and therefore what constitutes ‘negligence’. This chapter also addresses the interference to astronomy that is increasingly resulting from light and radio spectrum pollution from satellites. A full interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty leads to the conclusion that states are already required to take certain steps, including conducting an environmental impact assessment, before licensing mega-constellations, because of the obligation of ‘due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty’.

The content of this book is rather controversial. It paints a rather bleak picture, that the current EU legal economic system being developed for the data-driven economy is both outdated and – to some extent – a policy at war with itself. It promotes dominant platforms to detriment of others. Moreover, the fundamentals for creating rules are also missing. A liberal economic system needs to be based on aspects of a rights system, otherwise, we risk losing innovation, the establishment of new markets, and the creation of wealth, while we will see increasing market failures. Without a legal system for rights to data, we will lose out of a just system for the distribution of wealth. Indeed, it is time that the data-driven economy and the internet economy are granted their ‘property’ rights, reflecting the new paradigm of the data-driven industrial revolution. Moreover, such a regime fits well with the European economic constitution now being established.

Generally, it might seem that the problem of a few system leaders hoarding data should be addressed by competition law. Market power and monopolizations generally trigger competition-law remedies. However, as will be discussed below, when it comes to accessing data, and especially when access to data should be granted as a continuing service, competition law is generally the wrong platform to use. Access or forced collaboration is difficult to establish under competition law. The case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) makes it difficult to succeed in arguing that a refusal to grant access to data is an abuse of market dominance under Article 102 TFEU. Proving market dominance in data-related markets is a challenging undertaking and is highly case specific. Similarly, the very stringent requirements defining abuse were developed for different situations and may need to be adapted to circumstances of the data-driven economy. More importantly, only undertakings would be able to rely on a right to access data under Article 102 TFEU, which would generally exclude access claims of consumers. Finally, the enforcement system of competition law does not seem to be sufficiently effective to guarantee competitive markets for the mass phenomenon of data lock-ins caused by connected devices.1

Sector-specific regulations apply in several network industries. The telecom sector and infrastructures such as utilities have been regulated based on the notion that they are natural monopolies and need to be regulated to prevent facilitation of monopolies. However, in the beginning of the internet era, large tech escaped regulation.1

Data is vital to the internet-based economy and will become even more important in the old economy as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains ground. The competitiveness of firms will increasingly depend on timely access to relevant data and the ability to use that data to develop new, innovative applications and products. In consumer-oriented businesses, the relevant data is often personal information; although this data is becoming increasingly collectable, only a few firms have access to larger amounts of it.1

This essay offers an overview of literature and culture in Manaus between 1870 and 1930. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Manaus grew from a remote outpost in the Brazilian Amazon to one of the capitals of the rubber boom – a bustling port where British bankers mingled with Turkish traders and opera companies from Italy sang at the opulent Teatro Amazonas. By World War I, however, the rubber trade had shifted to southeast Asia and the city entered what is typically portrayed as a long decline. Most accounts of the boom depict Manaus as a place where “culture” was just another import and object of conspicuous consumption. In contrast, this essay shows how the social and economic relations, international influences, and cultural infrastructure established during the heyday of rubber were essential to the postboom emergence of a regionalist movement and efforts to articulate an explicitly Amazonian identity.

The first Amazon rubber boom (1870–1912) represents a defining event in the history of the Amazon and a pivotal moment in the development of modern industry. This chapter traces, from a transnational perspective, some of the most significant Brazilian and Spanish American literary responses to the cultural, political, territorial, and environmental transformations brought on by rubber extraction in turn-of-the-century Amazonia. It also examines how the literature of the period reinterpreted major rubber-related international incidents, such as the Acre territorial dispute (1899–1903), the Putumayo scandal (1907–1914), and the rubber regime known as “La Funera” (1910–1921). The chapter situates the works of Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), Alberto Rangel (1871–1945), José Eustasio Rivera (1888–1928), and César Uribe Piedrahita (1897–1951) within regional narrative traditions and in connection with later literary and cultural production related to the Amazon rubber boom.

The chapter explores the role of Italian opera in the Brazilian Amazon during the Belle Époque and its effects on national and transnational identities. It focuses on the region’s most famous opera house – the Teatro Amazonas – and on the successes and misfortunes of the travelling companies that performed there between 1897 and 1907. The chapter probes the extent to which the opera house was considered a means of engaging with a ‘global fantasy of civilisation’, foregrounding the effects that local tropical diseases had on opera production and on global perceptions of the region during a period of keen interest in its commercial exploration. The shift from the Italian to the French repertoire at the start of the twentieth century sheds new light on Amazonian understandings of different notions of italianità, of Europe and of civilisation.