Digital goods have their own economic characteristics. They are modular information goods. As a result of these characteristics, it is attractive to use abundance strategies to build networks and communities that interact via digital platforms. These platforms are often embedded in digital product ecosystems, which consist of a number of digital platforms and products. This chapter provides a clear view of what makes digital products unique and why this invites the platformization of the digital society. It also explains why platforms and ecosystems are able to generate efficiencies in wholly new ways compared to brick-and-mortar firms.

Digital services and artificial intelligence (AI) systems provide children with immense opportunities to communicate, learn, and play, but the use of tech platforms and AI may also pose risks to children’s rights. Rights that might be negatively affected include the right to privacy and data protection, freedom of thought, the right to freedom of expression, and the right to protection from violence and exploitation. Two recent European Union legislative instruments, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), aim to regulate platforms and AI systems. This chapter investigates to what extent the protection and fulfilment of children’s rights is addressed in the DSA and the AIA. We analyse the proposals, scrutinise the legislative process, and assess how each instrument contributes to the effective realisation of children’s rights in the digital realm. We find that whereas the DSA holds great promise for advancing children’s rights, depending on actual implementation and enforcement, the potential of the AIA for successfully protecting and promoting their rights in an increasingly AI-driven world is less clear and certain.

As Chapter 1 discusses, one of the most consistent conservative critiques of social media platforms is that social media is biased against conservative content. A common policy proposal to address this is to regulate such platforms as common carriers. Doing so would require social media platforms to host, on a nondiscriminatory basis, all legal user content and to permit all users to access platforms on equal terms. While this seems an attractive idea – after all, who could object to nondiscrimination – it is not. For one thing, the Supreme Court has now recognized that social media platforms possess "editorial rights" under the First Amendment to control what content they carry, block, and emphasize in their feeds. So, regulating platforms as common carriers, as Texas and Florida have sought to do, is unconstitutional. It is also a terrible idea. Requiring platforms to carry all content on a nondiscriminatory basis, even if limited to legal content (which it would be hard to do) would flood user feeds with such lawful-but-awful content as pornography, hate speech, and terrorist propaganda. This in turn would destroy social media as a usable medium, to the detriment of everyone.

As payment is increasingly becoming part of social media, it takes on the operating, governance, and revenue models of the Silicon Valley tech industry. At the same time, new platform payments “ride the rails” of long-standing infrastructures. These conditions create opportunities for surveillance and infrastructural power, as well as new unanticipated harms for users. As the future of money is imagined, it is wise to contemplate a payment ecosystem that is – like social media more broadly – increasingly private, siloed, and rife with scams.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by comparing leadership elections in the two major UK parties following the Brexit referendum. While Conservative members of parliament acted swiftly to replace their leader, Labour was unable to follow suit, leading to an unprecedented internal crisis. These divergent paths, Kernell argues, can best be explained by attention to party rules. After briefly extending the comparison to discuss party rules in several other countries, Chapter 1 summarizes the book’s core arguments and the formal model, introduces the evidence, and provides a roadmap for the rest of the book.

Chapter 3 guides the reader inside parties by examining how candidate nominations, leadership selection, and policy platforms operate in modern democracies around the world. Kernell examines variation among these rules both within and across countries, as well as over time, and proposes a coding methodology for defining the degree of membership influence in each of the three primary dimensions. The chapter also discusses case selection and data collection.

In order to manage the issue of diversity of regulatory vision, States may, to some extent, harmonize substantive regulation—eliminating diversity. This is less likely than States determining unilaterally or multilaterally to develop manageable rules of jurisdiction, so that their regulation applies only in limited circumstances. The fullest realization of this “choice of law” solution would involve geoblocking or other technology that divides up regulatory authority according to a specified, and a perhaps agreed, principle. Geoblocking may be costly and ultimately porous, but it would allow different communities to effectuate their different visions of the good in the platform context. To the extent that the principles of jurisdiction are agreed, and are structured to be exclusive, platforms would have the certainty of knowing the requirements under which they must operate in each market. Of course, different communities may remain territorial states, but given the a-territorial nature of the internet, it may be possible for other divisions of authority and responsibility to develop. Cultural affinity, or political perspective, may be more compelling as an organizational principle to some than territorial co-location.

When analysing disinformation, commentators often focus on major platforms and their influence on content circulation. Some also examine institutional media, especially broadcasting. Platforms and media are both relevant; both are important in the communicative infrastructure underlying public speech. Whatever the focus, there is an almost endless examination of issues and suggestions regarding what to do about disinformation. Commentary defines false or misleading information in different ways, compares it with historic practices of propaganda and persuasion, considers the emergence of large language models and content they could generate, documents varied legal responses, and considers what should be done. Here, I examine something that is relevant to that work but often not considered directly.

The issue of mass disinformation on the Internet is a long-standing concern for policymakers, legislators, academics and the wider public. Disinformation is believed to have had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Concern about the threat of foreign – mainly Russian – interference in the democratic process is also growing. The COVID-19 pandemic, which reached global proportions in 2020, gave new impetus to the spread of disinformation, which even put lives at risk. The problem is real and serious enough to force all parties concerned to reassess the previous European understanding of the proper regulation of freedom of expression.

Chile’s regulation of fake news dates back nearly a century. The initial instance occurred in 1925 during a constitutional crisis that resulted in the drafting of a new constitution. At that time, a de facto government issued a decree making it illegal to publish and distribute fake news. The second regulatory milestone occurred during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet with the inclusion of provisions related to defamation in the 1980 constitution. Defamation involved spreading false information through mass media to unjustly tarnish someone’s reputation. Upon the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1990, these stipulations were permanently abolished from the legal system. Since 2001, the judicial pursuit of disinformation in Chile has been limited to exceptional means such as the State Security Law or, indirectly, through the right to rectification.

A positive online presence is indispensable in modern life, but establishing one requires thought and strategy. This chapter explores how to use social media to your advantage, with an appealing bio, techniques for posting that attract attention and admiration, which platforms to choose, the power of blogging, the effective use of artificial intelligence, and how to create and incorporate photos and videos to help make an impact online.

Peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Turo, TaskRabbit, Eatwith, and Uber are transnational market actors, generating millions of transactions, in multiple jurisdictions across the globe. These companies connect individuals and small businesses via online platforms and mediate transactions in the real, offline world between owners and renters, service providers and service recipients. Despite their clear importance and their market influence, the legal role of peer-to-peer platforms remains elusive. The emerging transnational legal order is a mixture of self-regulation and sporadic, concrete state or local regulation in several jurisdictions. I suggest thinking of platforms as transnational actors and offer a conceptualization of their legal role. Access platforms create and maintain a market with its own rules, conventions, and entry and exit points. To capture the role of platform as constituting a market, I rely on fiduciary law, an area of private law area concerned with power and vulnerability. This role creates duties toward the participants in this market. This duty explains why, for example, the platform should be responsible for the discriminatory actions of its participants. Other obligations include the duty to give prior notice before pulling out from an area of activity, and duty to create and maintain fair entry and exit rules.

This chapter offers a synthesis on the role the law has to play in Automated States. Arguing for a new research and regulatory agenda on AI and ADM beyond the artificial ‘public’ and ‘private’ divide, it seeks to identify new approach and safeguards necessary to make AI companies and the Automated States accountable to their customers, citizens and communities. I argue that emphasis on procedural safeguards alone – or what I call procedural fetishism – is not enough to counter the unprecedented levels of AI power in the Automated States. Only by shifting our perspective from procedural to substantive, we can search for new ways to regulate the future in the Automated States. The chapter concludes the collection with an elaboration of what more substantive regulation should look like: create a global instrument on data privacy, redistribute wealth and power by breaking and taxing AI companies, increasing public scrutiny and adopting prohibitive laws; democratizing AI companies by making them public utilities, and giving people a say how these companies should be governed. Crucially, we must also decolonize future AI regulation by recognizing colonial practices of extraction and exploitation and paying attention to the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities of the so-called Global South. With all these mutually reinforcing efforts, the new AI regulation will debunk the corporate and state agenda of procedural fetishism and establish a new social contract in the age of AI.