Cary Coglianese (U Pennsylvania Carey Law) has posted “On the Need for Digital Regulators” (in Research Handbook on Digital Regulatory Agencies, Martha Garcia-Murillo and Ian MacInnes eds., forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The growing digital economy brings increasing recognition of the need for digital regulators. This chapter considers two senses of the term “digital regulators”: one of these refers to regulatorsof digital technology; the other refers to how any regulatory organization can improve its operationswith the use of digital technology. Today’s economy requires digital regulators of both types. The need for regulatorsof digital technology grows out of perennial concerns about market failures and other implicated social values, such as privacy. This chapter sketches the rationales that in the past have justified regulating digital technology, and then it explains how market-failure justifications continue to reveal a need for regulating today’s rapidly evolving digital technologies, including artificial intelligence. The chapter then shows how the need for regulatorswith digital technology has been evident since the advent of the internet and has grown even more compelling today with the possibilities created by artificial intelligence. One common thread from the past through to today is the need for multiple regulators both to oversee digital technologies and to use these technologies to improve their regulatory performance.