Regulating Code

Internet use has become ubiquitous in the past two decades, but
governments, legislators, and their regulatory agencies have struggled to keep up
with the rapidly changing Internet technologies and uses. In this groundbreaking
collaboration, regulatory lawyer Christopher Marsden and computer scientist Ian
Brown analyze the regulatory shaping of "code" -- the technological
environment of the Internet -- to achieve more economically efficient and socially
just regulation. They examine five "hard cases" that illustrate the
regulatory crisis: privacy and data protection; copyright and creativity incentives;
censorship; social networks and user-generated content; and net neutrality.


The authors describe the increasing
"multistakeholderization" of Internet governance, in which user groups
argue for representation in the closed business-government dialogue, seeking to
bring in both rights-based and technologically expert perspectives. Brown and
Marsden draw out lessons for better future regulation from the regulatory and
interoperability failures illustrated by the five cases. They conclude that
governments, users, and better functioning markets need a smarter "prosumer
law" approach. Prosumer law would be designed to enhance the competitive
production of public goods, including innovation, public safety, and fundamental
democratic rights.