Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

Regulation 2.0: The Marriage of New Governance and Lex Informatica

Throughout history, disruptive technologies have transformed industry and signaled the destruction or creation of regulatory structures. When crafting regulations, governments often utilize Regulation 1.0 approaches, characterized by top-down design standards that dictate exactly how the regulated must act in order to prevent market failures. Regulation 1.0 increases barriers to entry and decreases the room for business experimentation. Regulation 2.0, by contrast, is a theoretical approach for regulating companies that rely on platform-mediated networks. It marries New Governance theory and the concept of lex informatica. This marriage allows for the collaborative creation of design standards that are then enforced through mediating technologies. Regulation 2.0 is ideal for regulating the sharing economy in particular, as it is powered by technology-driven feedback loops. The shift from Regulation 1.0 to Regulation 2.0 will help regulators meaningfully collaborate with stakeholders and complete the heavy lifting required to effectively turn code into law and efficiently achieve the desired ends of regulation

Infracompetitive Privacy

One of the chief anticompetitive effects of modern business lies in antitrust’s blind spot. Platform-based companies (“platforms”) have innovated a business model whereby they offer consumers “free and low-priced services in exchange for their personal information. With this data, platforms can design products, target consumers, and sell such information to third parties. The problem is that platforms can inflict greater costs on users and markets in the form of lost privacy than efficiencies generated from their low prices. Consumers, as examples, spend billions of dollars annually to remedy privacy breaches and, alarmingly, participate unwittingly in experiments designed to manipulate their behaviors, compromising human agency. But because antitrust law uses consumer prices to measure welfare, platforms and privacy injuries have avoided antitrust scrutiny. We show that insufficient competition enables platforms to capture the economic benefits of data while externalizing the costs of protecting it. As we find, consumers demand privacy yet firms in monopolized markets have powerful incentives to shift the costs of protecting privacy onto society. To reduce the rate of privacy breaches, we show that increasing competition would 1) allow users to punish offending firms, 2) disseminate information about the true costs of privacy, and 3) introduce more secure services into the market. As such, because monopoly power encourages firms to disregard the privacy demands of users, antitrust must evolve to recognize that the costs of inadequate privacy can degrade consumer welfare more than artificially high prices

Paris, Panels, and Protectionism: Matching US Rhetoric with Reality to Save the Planet

US rhetoric has not matched reality in the free trade or sustainability contexts, as may be seen by the ongoing debates surrounding a range of behaviors that violate international trade rules. The US government\u27s failure to adhere to the rules that it was instrumental in crafting sets a particularly troubling precedent. These trade distortions reduce trust and respect among countries and undermine efforts to combat climate change. Simultaneously, we are witnessing a growing preference for minilateral agreements, as may be seen in the Obama Administration\u27s push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and US-EU Trade Pact. This trend is likely to continue as Donald Trump has signaled his intention to move away from multilateral trade deals and favor bilateral accords. The Chinese government has pursued a similar approach in the context of financial governance and, with its recent creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, has also exhibited a willingness to circumvent existing global institutions. Concurrently, the international community has been engaged in negotiations under the umbrella of the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change to mitigate the threat of global climate change and similarly promote sustainability, most recently via the Paris Agreement. This Article identifies a series of inconsistencies in US trade policies and completes a comparative case study of the ongoing disputes between China and the United States surrounding solar energy subsidies in hopes of finding opportunities for collective action that promotes both free trade and sustainability. It also pinpoints roadblocks to promoting both the free trade and sustainability movements, and through the lens of the literature on polycentric governance, discusses the trend towards--as well as the benefits and drawbacks of--minilateral and multilateral approaches to furthering sustainable development

Defending Democracy: Taking Stock of the Global Fight Against Digital Repression, Disinformation, and Election Insecurity

Amidst the regular drumbeat of reports about Russian attempts to undermine U.S. democratic institutions from Twitter bots to cyber-attacks on Congressional candidates, it is easy to forget that the problem of election security is not isolated to the United States and extends far beyond safeguarding insecure voting machines. Consider Australia, which has long been grappling with repeated Chinese attempts to interfere with its political system. Yet Australia has taken a distinct approach in how it has sought to protect its democratic institutions, including reclassifying its political parties as “critical infrastructure,” a step that the U.S. government has yet to take despite repeated breaches at both the Democratic and Republican National Committees. This Article analyzes the Australian approach to protecting its democratic institutions from Chinese influence operations and compares it to the U.S. response to Russian efforts. It then moves on to discuss how other cyber powers, including the European Union, have taken on the fight against digital repression and disinformation, and then compares these practices to the particular vulnerabilities of Small Pacific Island Nations. Such a comparative study is vital to help build resilience, and trust, in democratic systems on both sides of the Pacific. We argue that a multifaceted approach is needed to build more resilient and sustainable democratic systems. This should encompass both targeted reforms focusing on election infrastructure security—such as requiring paper ballots and risk-limiting audits—with deeper structural interventions to limit the spread of misinformation and combat digital repression

Narrative approach to understand people's comprehension of acquaintance rape: The role of Sex Role Stereotyping

One of the most unreported crimes is acquaintance rape. This may be the result of people's understanding of what rape is because of their rape script and their stereotypes of victim characteristics. These judgements may be moderated by sex role stereotyping (SRS). We utilised a narrative approach to understand low and high SRS participants' rape scripts. Young-adult participants described what they believed a typical rape was, followed by describing an acquaintance rape and then what they believed the stereotypical victim of each crime would be. A narrative analysis was conducted on the data. We found that the blitz script is still held by 44% of low SRS and 47% of high SRS people despite 90% of rapes being committed by an acquaintance. While acquaintance rape scripts existed, the emotional imagery and content of these depended on participants level of SRS. Stereotypical victim characteristics also depended on SRS: those with high SRS were more likely to endorse rape myth ideals in describing victims than those with low SRS. These results have implications for educating people about what rape is so that victims might feel more confident in reporting rape

The Myth of the Sharing Economy and Its Implications for Regulating Innovation

A deflated air mattress rests in the corner of Airbnb¿s world headquarters. It symbolizes how Airbnb allows regular, local people to earn extra income by renting out space in their homes. Yet, this symbolism fails to represent what the company has become¿a unicorn receiving much of its revenue from professionals with full-time listings. The poorly folded wad of plastic exemplifies the Myth of the Sharing Economy, which has been consistently used to subvert regulation. While much has been written regarding the benefits of the sharing economy and how to regulate it, and disruptive innovations more broadly, this Article is the first to critique the sharing economy by exploring the intersection between narrative and regulation. It also distills lessons for regulating future innovations and demonstrates the importance of questioning the difference between rhetoric and reality to achieve public policy goals

Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understand-ing of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers

The Myth of the Sharing Economy and Its Implications for Regulating Innovation

A deflated air mattress rests in the corner of Airbnb¿s world headquarters. It symbolizes how Airbnb allows regular, local people to earn extra income by renting out space in their homes. Yet, this symbolism fails to represent what the company has become¿a unicorn receiving much of its revenue from professionals with full-time listings. The poorly folded wad of plastic exemplifies the Myth of the Sharing Economy, which has been consistently used to subvert regulation. While much has been written regarding the benefits of the sharing economy and how to regulate it, and disruptive innovations more broadly, this Article is the first to critique the sharing economy by exploring the intersection between narrative and regulation. It also distills lessons for regulating future innovations and demonstrates the importance of questioning the difference between rhetoric and reality to achieve public policy goals