The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
How the encroachment of private capital into the broadband ecosystem threatens local provision and the goal of universal, affordable broadband.
Disagreement over recent TikTok legislation reveals a deep divide about our current political moment. Should we, like many of the bill’s proponents, assume the existence of a functional, liberal state whose machinery tends toward justice? Or do recent illiberal trends give us reason to reject this assumption? Before we move to further concentrate global surveillance and propaganda power in the hands of the United States, we should be clear-eyed about the threats to speech and privacy that emanate from within.
Ganesh Sitaraman, Sanjay Jolly, Zephyr Teachout, Nikolas Guggenberger, Anupam Chander, and Elettra Bietti share their initial reactions to the pending TikTok ban.
A ruling that tech companies don’t have to comply with neutral regulations would not just block two sloppy laws, it would put a block on politics itself. This is a moment for the Court to stand back and allow democracy to work its clumsy, painful magic.
This morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the most anticipated cases of the year for the future of regulating tech platforms. While much of the debate will focus on whether the platforms are best analogized to publishers, there is another important argument that the Supreme Court will confront: whether platforms are “common carriers.”
Twelve titles that the Blog’s editors can’t wait to read in the months to come.
President Biden’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence addresses a wide array of concerns about the nascent technology: risks to national security, the use of deceptive AI-generated content, market concentration, and much else. To help sort through the meaning and implications of these various directives, we asked seven experts for their initial reactions.
Earlier this month, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. His conviction should not, however, be seen as any kind of victory. For the past three years, SBF successfully exploited a financial regulatory system stuck in older ways of thinking and increasingly incapable of averting illicit finance in the platform economy. To prevent such predation in the future, LPE scholars must help accelerate the turn to proactive planning, including via the day-to-day, direct supervision of major financial institutions.
Algorithmic wage discrimination – paying workers personalized wages using opaque and fluctuating formulas – is common in the gig economy. But with the recent development of intrusive new forms of employee surveillance, such wage-setting practices will be coming soon to a workplace near you. This post offers a brief taxonomy of five different forms of algorithmic wage differentiation, each of which is already visible in the gig work economy, and explains how the spread of these management techniques threatens workers’ well-being and political freedom.
In Paul Gowder’s recent blog post, as well as in his new book, he argues that we should democratize, rather than dismantle or restructure, Big Tech platforms. However, this familiar framing obscures more than it reveals, relying upon an impoverished account of the political economy of technology, of the co-evolution of politics and production, and of the core role of material infrastructure in digital settings.
Some people head to the pumpkin patch. Others drink from the unholy fountain of the pumpkin spice latte. But here at the Blog, our favorite autumnal activity is decidedly less gourd-based: we scour the internet for the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, labor, housing, the administrative state, criminal justice, family law, religious freedom, finance, legal theory, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
There is, at present, a conceptual mismatch between the strategies of accumulation that are dominant in the digital economy and the basic assumptions that underlie the legal regimes tasked with regulating accumulation. To begin to address this discrepancy, legal actors in these regimes need a better understanding of how companies translate social data into profits and power.
With bipartisan calls to break up big tech, it is worth pausing to ask whether the proposed remedy matches the diagnosis of the problem. Antitrust breakups work best when there’s a clear conflict between public and company interests. Yet with some of the most pressing problems – such as the spread of disinformation – company and public interests plausibly converge. An alternative approach would be to keep tech companies intact but integrate users and workers more directly into their governance systems.
With the spring submission season nearly in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, the LPE Blog highlights some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, care, labor, criminal justice, religious freedom, money and banking, property, the administrative state, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
