Law and the Political Economy of Technology

Guest Blogger

1. Technology helps mediate the relationship between the economy and political power.  What are important ways that technology does this in the United States in the current moment?  What role does technology (or how it is regulated or described) play in creating, exacerbating, or obscuring aspects of the relationship between the economy and political power?
2. What would more democratic governance of technology look like and require today?  What political and legal responses to the growing functional sovereignty of platforms are necessary?  How can law and legal scholarship respond to the power of platforms and social media companies have over the contemporary public sphere - power that is both obvious and obscure?
3. What case studies offer insight into the ways in which law, norms, and technology interact to shape economic and political power in a given domain, such as healthcare, consumer markets, employment, housing, or finance? 
4. Does a political economy lens help illuminate differences in how contemporary technologies influence politics and inequality, as compared to how older technologies did so?  For example: much has been written about the differences between print and online media, and between Uber and the taxi industry.  A political economy approach asks us to think about the role of ownership and incentives (e.g. “clicks” as revenue model, as compared to print advertising; revenue models of “sharing platforms” like Uber vs. the taxi industry), economic power (e.g. network effects, vertical and horizontal integration), feedback effects between political and economic power, and the legal regulation of the private market (differences in IP and “real property” or how copyright affects online media vs. the traditional news media).  Does thinking through these lenses - and the role of law in constructing each - help us better understand, or intervene in, technology today?
5. A political economy approach also asks us to consider the forms of power current political and economic arrangements allocate to different parties.  How do today’s approaches to the regulation of technology produce certain patterns of power and powerlessness?  How do today’s approaches to economic regulation produce patterns of technological use that reinforce these patterns? Are there ways to use law to democratize the technology sector in ways that will build power among those who have the least?   What might such interventions look like? For example, should we elevate antitrust or labor law reforms over more traditional “command and control” regulatory approaches?
6. Race and gender also influence, and are influenced by, the political economy of technology.  What are important ways that race and gender matter to technology?  How are racialized and gendered hierarchies shaped by technology?     
1. Much has been written about algorithmic discrimination.  Are there discriminatory implications of technology that have received less attention?  What does antidiscrimination law need to tackle to address discrimination in the contemporary technological age?
2. How does the changing nature of the labor market (e.g. the gig economy) draw on, and / or reinforce gendered and racialized divisions and hierarchies?
3. How does technology change the nature and power of the carceral state?  Does it also create new potential to make that state more democratic - and do matters of ownership and control over technology matter to such change?
7. Is intellectual property receding as a lynchpin of economic order and power?  (Google and Facebook derive important power from IP in their algorithms and trademarks, of course, but going forward their most important power may be over platforms and data, neither of which can be “owned” in classic intellectual property terms.) If so, why, and what is replacing it?  Power in the data layer?  Ownership of platforms?  Physical more than legal exclusion? Is the opposition between commons and property central to the battles over IP still a productive framework for thinking about the institutional foundations of economic power?
8. Are present successors to commons-based and cooperative approaches developed in the first decade of the 21^st century, such as platform or open cooperatives, plausible solutions to the imbalances of economic power in the emerging technological context? 
9. How is the language of “openness” helpful - or not - in attempts to democratize technology today?  What lessons can we learn about the challenges on the path to democratizing technology from the cooptation of “open” and “sharing economy” rhetoric to legitimate extractive practices?
10. How does the ownership and structure of the technology sector generally, and social media more specifically: (i) shape American politics, (ii) influence what questions (don’t) receive public or governmental attention, and/or (iii) create feedback effects so that owners become more powerful and influential over time? How is law embedded in these ownership structures, and how can we address them through law?  Is there an “open data” equivalent to open access policies used to regulate the first broadband transition in telecommunications throughout most of the world (though not the U.S.) that could offer more competition in services on shared platform facilities?
11. How does law and the current distribution of political power shape the technologies we have?  For example, does the nature of VC financing influence the design of technology?  Do differences in labor law in the US and Germany influence not just the adoption but also the design of robots in different places?  What would technology that was created by a more egalitarian political economy look like?  (For example, would we produce more preventative medicines or medicines for the poor?  More advances in public transportation than in self-driving cars?)    

• Yochai Benkler: “Network Pragmatism: Towards an Open Social Economy”

• Veena Dubal: “Rule-making as State Violence: Understanding the Legal Transition to an Uber Economy from the Taxi Driver’s’ Seat”
• Brishen Rogers: “Democratization as a Policy Response to Workplace Technological Change”
• Dorian Warren: Commentary
• Moderator: Yochai Benkler

• Amy Kapczynski: “Political Economy and Technological Power: The Role of ‘Riparian’ Data  Rights, Trade Secrets, and Contracts”
• Frank Pasquale: “Questioning Computationalist Projects in Contemporary Law & Economics”
• Moderator: Rebecca Crootof

• Rebecca Crootof: “Torts and New Technologies: New Relationships, New Harms, New Duties”
• Elizabeth Joh: “Police Surveillance Machines: A Short History”
• Talha Syed: “Reorienting Technology Policy: From Regulating to Embedding Innovation”
• Moderator: Jack Balkin

• Lina Khan: “Forms of Technological Power: Gatekeeping, Leveraging, and Information Exploitation”
• Ganesh Sitaraman: “How to Regulate Tech Platforms”
• Moderator: Amy Kapczynski

• Jack Balkin: “The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age”
• Sabeel Rahman: “Artificial Sovereigns: A Quasi-Constitutional Moment for Tech?”
• Moderator: Yochai Benkler

• Moderator: Amy Kapczynski