Regulating Digital Technologies Part 1: Delegating Authority and Setting Standards

Abstract

Recent advances in digital technological innovation have presented significant new challenges to regulators and lawmakers. While these innovations may make important contributions to society, they also present potential new market failures that need to be addressed. Autonomous vehicles raise new questions around road safety, algorithms in government have the potential to discriminate against people of particular gender/ethnicity, facial recognition systems may violate civil liberties, tech platforms may spread disinformation while unlawfully violating data privacy laws, to list a few salient examples. In each instance, regulators must consult and gather information in order to identify the relevant market failures, as well as methods of mitigating those failures. Flexible regulatory tools, such as management-based regulation or meta-regulation have been advocated here, as well as incremental, adaptive approaches, which emphasise careful monitoring and evaluation in order to learn more about the products themselves and their potential dangers. In other instances, outright bans have been urged if the cost of the market failure is too high. However, achieving a balance which allows innovation to grow while limiting the negative consequences remains a challenge. For this panel, we welcome papers which investigate methods/instruments/tools of regulating technological challenges. In particular, we are interested in papers taking a comparative perspective, across regulatory approaches or across areas of technology. A further area of interest for this panel consists of case studies regarding how regulators and lawmakers deal with balancing precaution and innovation.

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