This book is about how the technological advances in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) that have fundamentally changed the nature of the US markets for futures contracts and other derivatives are necessitating, in some areas, changes to the legal and regulatory framework for these markets. To arrive at policy solutions to address the ways that AI systems are altering the markets, this book examines how algorithmic robots – algo bots, for short – have largely taken over trading in the futures markets, analyzes how regulators have responded to these changes thus far, and explores what steps policy makers should take in the future. But before diving into any of those topics, allow me to put the societal impact of these advances in computer science technologies in a broader context, beyond finance and derivatives.

This chapter is both a retrospective, and also even a requiem, for the “unregulation” argument in Internet law, and a prospective on the next twenty-five years of computer (or cyber) law. The Internet is not a lawless, special unregulated zone; it never was. Now that broadband Internet is ubiquitous, mobile, and relatively reliable in urban and suburban areas, it is being regulated as all mass media before it. While American policymakers advocated a largely deregulatory approach to the internet over the past twenty-five years, the United Kingdom and Europe have emphasized the hybrid of governmental and private market oversight known as coregulation. This approach to making regulation more adaptive addresses key dilemmas that fast-moving, slippery technologies pose for the traditional regulator’s toolkit.