In Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1885–6), a fictional version of Thomas Edison builds a mechanical female automaton as a replacement for a human woman. This chapter reads the novel and its gynoid Hadaly as works of decadent speculative fiction. After tracing the relationships of L’Ève Future to decadence as a literary movement via late nineteenth-century writers such as J.-K. Huysmans, Paul Bourget, and Arthur Symons, it argues that the work’s decadent tropes and commitments allow it to place a critical spin on automata and automatism. Villiers’s vision of automacy – as alluringly artificial yet both relational and entangled in cultural norms about the human – not only exceeds the analogous ventures of the real-life Edison but also resonates with attempts to come to terms with the nature and functions of autonomous artificial entities today.

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

This chapter focuses on the inner workings of networked services – what technologies they use and how they work – which will enable a deeper understanding of the methods used for corporate surveillance. The chapter first introduces the internet protocol suite and its most important protocols, and then explains the systems and languages used to deliver web-based content and mobile content.