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.

Networks, constituted through standards, have turned into a new transnational and extragovernmental form of regulation. As a result, governments will struggle to control the operators of cyberspace through force of law. In hindsight, a critical blind spot of the 1990s’ vision for the digital economy was the assumption that Internet-based networking would generally lead to the diffusion of power. The rise of networks has, in many cases, either created new dominant power centers or entrenched old ones. Networks and standards represent a new hybrid legal-institutional form of governance, which is developing across a wide range of geographies and public policy arenas. The rise of networked governance has, in turn, empowered digital platforms to exercise enormous power outside the limitations of regulation or other traditional constraints.

Automated decision-making and profiling are becoming more prolific and changing in nature. What began with police photography and Habitual Criminal Registers has reached a new crescendo with computer vision and data science. Law has struggled to adequately regulate these technologies and practices. Where it has been successful, law constrains profiling by protecting ‘identity’. However, in the contemporary technological environment, the notions of identity that animate the legal thinking and the notions of identity that animate the data science and profiling are markedly different. This chapter introduces the argument that these contradictory ways of thinking about people is why the law has struggled to introduce meaningful regulation in this field. It introduces the metaphor of the ‘world state’, the process by which the world and the people within it are translated into the computational world, and asks what law needs to do as the world state becomes more prominent.