A positive online presence is indispensable in modern life, but establishing one requires thought and strategy. This chapter explores how to use social media to your advantage, with an appealing bio, techniques for posting that attract attention and admiration, which platforms to choose, the power of blogging, the effective use of artificial intelligence, and how to create and incorporate photos and videos to help make an impact online.

Peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Turo, TaskRabbit, Eatwith, and Uber are transnational market actors, generating millions of transactions, in multiple jurisdictions across the globe. These companies connect individuals and small businesses via online platforms and mediate transactions in the real, offline world between owners and renters, service providers and service recipients. Despite their clear importance and their market influence, the legal role of peer-to-peer platforms remains elusive. The emerging transnational legal order is a mixture of self-regulation and sporadic, concrete state or local regulation in several jurisdictions. I suggest thinking of platforms as transnational actors and offer a conceptualization of their legal role. Access platforms create and maintain a market with its own rules, conventions, and entry and exit points. To capture the role of platform as constituting a market, I rely on fiduciary law, an area of private law area concerned with power and vulnerability. This role creates duties toward the participants in this market. This duty explains why, for example, the platform should be responsible for the discriminatory actions of its participants. Other obligations include the duty to give prior notice before pulling out from an area of activity, and duty to create and maintain fair entry and exit rules.

This chapter offers a synthesis on the role the law has to play in Automated States. Arguing for a new research and regulatory agenda on AI and ADM beyond the artificial ‘public’ and ‘private’ divide, it seeks to identify new approach and safeguards necessary to make AI companies and the Automated States accountable to their customers, citizens and communities. I argue that emphasis on procedural safeguards alone – or what I call procedural fetishism – is not enough to counter the unprecedented levels of AI power in the Automated States. Only by shifting our perspective from procedural to substantive, we can search for new ways to regulate the future in the Automated States. The chapter concludes the collection with an elaboration of what more substantive regulation should look like: create a global instrument on data privacy, redistribute wealth and power by breaking and taxing AI companies, increasing public scrutiny and adopting prohibitive laws; democratizing AI companies by making them public utilities, and giving people a say how these companies should be governed. Crucially, we must also decolonize future AI regulation by recognizing colonial practices of extraction and exploitation and paying attention to the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities of the so-called Global South. With all these mutually reinforcing efforts, the new AI regulation will debunk the corporate and state agenda of procedural fetishism and establish a new social contract in the age of AI.

Chapter 7 begins the task of unpacking contemporary information technologies. Taking leave from Soshana Zuboff’s critique of surveillance capitalism, we suggest a further step beyond anthropocentric ideas of control. We discuss how organizational forms such as platforms and systems like Enterprise Resource Planning products, have come to ‘run’ organizations, but in ways that also extend, replace and veil human cognition, in often imperceptibly powerful ways. And yet, these widely connected networks, the computational apparatuses, intelligent algorithms and digital media are fundamentally indifferent to what they ‘replace’. They no longer bring anything near, moreover there is no-one to whom such pictures and things can be brought. Agency, not just human agency, but all agency, is dissipated into brief small blips.

In policy debates about the design of digital platforms, privacy has long been an issue of central importance. Understanding the antecedents and elements of privacy is particularly important in the context of sharing economy platforms that may manage highly sensitive information. This chapter proposes a comprehensive framework for addressing privacy concerns arising on sharing economy platforms. Our framework is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on information exchange and aims to classify all possible information exchanges that take place on sharing economy platforms. In the second part, we examine how platform users may use privacy calculus to make decisions about which information exchanges (i.e., accepted information exchanges) they wish to participate in. We conclude by highlighting the role of information transparency and privacy literacy and suggesting directions for future research.

This introductory chapter briefly outlines the main theme of this volume, namely, to review the new opportunities and risks of digital healthcare from various disciplinary perspectives. These perspectives include law, public policy, organisational studies, and applied ethics. Based on this interdisciplinary approach, we hope that effective strategies may arise to ensure that benefits of this ongoing revolution are deployed in a responsible and sustainable manner. The second part of the chapter comprises a brief review of the four parts and fourteen substantive chapters that make up this volume.

An understanding of modern corporate groups can be sought through a historical–theoretical analysis of the core evolutionary phases that have shaped the group structures of today. I divide the legal history of corporate groups into four phases: the state-chartered corporate groups, the commercialization of groups through the legal recognition of corporate shareholders, globalization and the rise of multinational groups, and the twenty-first-century technological and interconnected group structures. Furthermore, I use this to argue that the gap between legislation and practice has increased over time, with each phase adding a new layer of complexity that makes recognition of corporate groups more difficult. It is likely, in light of this observation, that innovation will not stop, and that new modes of complexity will arise in the future.

There is a growing international consensus that standard competition law is inadequate for addressing the panoply of competition problems arising in digital platform markets. Alongside a proposal for ex ante regulation in this arena, the European Commission is considering the introduction of a ‘New Competition Tool’ which is broadly modelled on the UK Market Investigation instrument. This chapter abstracts from the specifics of the EU situation and considers the pros and cons of market investigations in the context of the UK regime. It concludes that the tool is a valuable addition to the standard competition law toolkit, and that this is likely to be true also at EU level, both for digital platforms and more widely. However, because the tool is potentially so powerful and flexible, it merits strong procedural checks and balances, to guard against confirmation bias or politicisation. The tool also has important limitations and thus should not be viewed as a full solution to the issues raised by digital platforms, but rather as a valuable complementary tool alongside new ex ante regulation. Interoperability is discussed as one area where the tools may act in a complementary way.

Digital entrepreneurship refers to the means or methods of creating fresh and innovative businesses, products or commodities as well as services that are enabled, permitted and provided via the Internet. Social media also refers to the mode by which people interact through the exchange of ideas and information in virtual networks. There are plenty of social media platforms in existence today; amongst the most popular are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp. The use of social media platforms for digital entrepreneurship can create opportunities like working remotely, on-the-go and at any time in the world. This chapter offers an insight into social media, its advantages on digital entrepreneurship as well as the potential future of social media for digital entrepreneurship.

The environmental concern and its social side effects will be at the core of regulatory authorities’ agenda on top of short-term efficiency objectives in the foreseeable future. The steady growth of ‘big data’, of digitalization and of the new data-processing technologies will change the way firms and governments use and share information in the design, compliance and enforcement of regulation. The institutional environment of regulation will need to evolve to correct institutional mistakes of the past and to internalize the impact of the data revolution on the distribution of regulatory mandates across agencies and across sectors within countries and across countries. Non-traditional financial actors will press regulators to internalize more systematically financial markets’ concerns in the design of regulation in exchange for their willingness to help close the financing gap of many regulated industries. Keeping the right balance between the return-on-investment objectives of non-traditional financial actors, investment targets, users’ needs and taxpayers’ benefit is a challenge for the regulators of the future. Tools emerging from applied research in behavioural economics will offer new alternative regulatory tools to improve the effectiveness and targeting of regulation.

This chapter outlines the nature of standards, with a particular focus on interoperability or compatibility standards. Standards in concept are introduced. A typology of standards is provided, which distinguishes between ‘interoperability’ or ‘compatibility’ standards and other types of standards, as well as between formal and de facto standards. The concept of an interoperability or compatibility standard is then examined in more detail. The work then examines and discusses some noteworthy interoperability standards, both from within and outside the field of information and communications technology (ICT). The key fora for the creation of interoperability standards are surveyed. The highly variegated nature of the interoperability standards-setting landscape is emphasized, as well as the relative ease with which standard-setting initiatives can migrate from one forum to another. The economic characteristics of interoperability standards are examined, in particular demand-side economies of scale or ‘network effects’, both direct and indirect (the latter being of primary importance to the work).

Over recent years, economists, lawyers and regulators have become increasingly interested in the role played by ‘network effects’ in the digital economy: namely, the phenomenon whereby a platform becomes increasingly valuable to its users, the more users it succeeds in recruiting. Whether user-generated content on Youtube and Facebook, proprietorial messaging services such as Whatsapp, or two-sided markets such as Uber and Airbnb, it is now widely recognised that many of today’s most successful technology businesses enjoy a dominance based upon achieving a critical mass of users, which makes it near-impossible for less well-used platforms to compete. What is less widely recognised is that data-driven personalisation operates in a comparable (albeit not identical) manner: as the volume of users increases, personalisation becomes ever more sophisticated, generating a ‘second-order’ network effect that can also have significant implications for the viability of competition. This paper unpacks the distinction between first-order and second-order network effects, showing how both can create significant barriers to competition. It analyses what second-order network effects imply for how governments can and should regulate data-driven personalisation, and how states might help their citizens to regain control over the value that they create.

‘Positive’ in positive free speech can mean enabled freedom or a legally (and perhaps judicially) protected right. Both meanings can be important. Understanding arguments for positive free speech and how some courts protect it reveals what the freedom entails, provides ideas and techniques for various constitutional actors, and suggests the improbability of legislatures alone protecting positive free speech enough. A partial framework for the positive freedom is taken from earlier chapters, drawing on media studies models of diverse media, the freedom’s democratic basis, analyses of positive human rights, political freedom, the US First Amendment, and constitutional law from Germany and France. Questions about democratic legitimacy and judicial rights protection are examined. Criticisms of judicial rights review can presuppose effective public speech, but such speech appears unlikely without legal protection of positive free speech which may well require judicial action, although questions remain about such action’s effectiveness. Finally, points are raised about applying historical lessons of this study to the changed contemporary environment for public speech.