Sharing economy businesses open up new markets and bring about new regulatory challenges. These could be solved with traditional competition instruments, although adapted to the peculiar features of the sharing economy, including, among others, multi-sidedness and the presence of different externalities.
News and Research articles on Amazon
The convergence of media markets and the emergence of video-sharing platforms may make the existing regulative tradition obsolete. This essay demonstrates an emergent need for regulatory convergence on European Union’s Audiovisual Media Service Directive (AVMSD).
Multi-sided online platforms such as social networks, search services and trading platforms can benefit society in important ways. This paper examines the competition effects of data portability among these platforms.
In a talk within the series “Big Data: Big power shifts?” held on 5 November 2015 in Berlin, sociologist Mike Savage argued that the most successful and popular social scientists primarily build up their work on data analysis.
The Russian 'dictatorship-of-the-law' paradigm is all but over: it is deploying online, with potentially harmful consequences for Russia's attempts to attract foreign investments in the internet sector, and for users' rights online.
This article examines the stance of the European Union vis-à-vis internet services company Google in two controversial instances: the ‘right to be forgotten’ and the implementation of EU competition rules.
Monika Ermert reports from the Munich Security Conference, where experts ponder over hybrid and cyber war.
Hacktivists 1.0 were Anonymous mask wearing outsiders. Subsequent generations are made up of insiders who use privacy enhancing technologies to hide their identities, to keep power under control or to disengage.
The 'Facebook online social experiment' has caused much controversy. Researchers Cornelius Puschmann and Engin Bozdag review the debate around research ethics and come to the conclusion that "benefits for science should be balanced with possible hazards that may be caused by experiments, rather than precluding that such benefits outweigh the gains".
Claus Schaale of Cisco Systems offers an insider's take on the adoption of privacy protecting measures in times of cloud computing and the so-called Internet of Things.
Much of our economy is moving online, but who will pay taxes, when virtual is tax exempted or when only some regions earn from the digital businesses lured by nice lax tax regulation or otherwise. Read up on how the struggle for tax and data are intertwined.
Online fan communities create fascinating and in-depth work based on what they love - but are they in the clear when it comes to copyright?
By retracing the stages of development of a 'peer-to-peer cloud' storage service, Francesca Musiani argues that decentralised network architectures are internet governance 'in practice'.
The European Civil Liberties Committee LIBE is pushing the EU data protection regulation draft forward. Yet, many compromises are made along the way, leaving Europeans wondering who will be the good, the bad and the ugly in the data protection saga.
Cloud-based information intermediaries curate information and distribute in a way that fundamentally challenges the right of access to information.
Algorithms are hidden everywhere in our daily lives. They regulate us, in a sense. How can we, then, take part in the governance by algorithms?
ICANN gets closer to presenting new domain names for the net, but discussions on safeguards and obligations for the domain industry continue.
This article presents a general analysis of how user autonomy in the internet cloud is increasingly put into jeopardy by the growing comfort and efficiency of the user-interface. Although this issue has not been, thus far, explicitly addressed by the law, it is a fundamental ethical question that should be carefully assessed to guide the future deployment of cloud computing.
Private actors in the information technology sector are currently playing an increasingly important role in content mediation, as well as in regulation of online forms of expression, with implications for both internet rights and economic freedom. The latest Google Transparency Report (Google, 2013) released on January 24, 2013, sends a clear and somewhat disquieting message to the advocates of a more transparent internet governance worldwide. Several governments in the European Union are submitting a steadily increasing number of requests to the giant of online information search, with two purposes: the acquisition of several types of sensitive information about internet users – including …