Publications

These two volumes collect twenty five articles and papers published within the “Governance of/through Data” research project financed by the Italian Ministry of Universities. The research project, which was promoted by Roma Tre University, as project lead, and saw the participation of professors and reseachers from Bocconi University in Milan; LUMSA University in Rome; Salento University in Lecce and Turin Polytechnic, cover multiple issues which are here presented in five sections: Algorithms and artificial intelligence; Antitrust, artificial intelligence and data; Big Data; Data governance; Data protection and privacy.

Antitrust law addresses conspiracy, or collaborative conduct, more harshly than it does unilateral conduct. One person acting alone can get away with far more than groups of firms acting by agreement. In most cases that distinction is justified. Creating substantial market power unilaterally is difficult and relatively uncommon, but it can be created in a moment’s time by an agreement among firms. But how do antitrust tribunals determine when conduct is unilateral rather than collaborative? Often the ansawer is obvious, but sometimes it is not. Two statutory provisions were intended to be the umpire of such decisions. A section of the Sherman considered so important that it was re-enacted in the Clayton Act provides that corporations and associations authorized by state law should be treated as “persons,” or single actors. The provisions address the core problems about internal corporate structure, including the single-entity status of holding companies, the legitimacy or not of suits between shareholders or employees and their firm, or the status of professional associations. The fact that the Sherman Act’s corporate personhood provision was re-enacted virtually verbatim in the Clayton Act is significant, because the intervening quarter century had witnessed a fierce debate over the power and reach of the business corporation. The personhood provisions fall short, however, because they completely ignore most of the interesting cases where conspiratorial capacity is in issue. They have nothing to contribute to situations where the precise boundaries of the corporation become ambiguous. Nor do they provide a solution to the problem of how to address labor disputes between an employer and its own employees. Further, and inadvertently, the statutes have encouraged certain types of industry structures that are not mandated by good competition policy, including the tendency to merge in order to avoid harsh rules about collusion, and the tendency to integrate vertically by ownership even when contractual integration might be superior.

In this report, the National Board of Trade Sweden highlights the challenges that digital innovation creates for technical regulation. The report questions whether artificial intelligence and cyber vulnerabilities are changing the way industrial goods, such as some smartphones, medical devices, and vehicles with embedded digital technologies, are regulated.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated ongoing developments in decision-making, which bring the notion of risk and the agencies responsible for its assessment and management at the forefront of the government agenda. The current centrality of risk regulation is dictated by the commitment by governments to achieve ambitious yet imperative sustainability objectives, and by the need to manage the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It lays against the overall debate about the role of science in informing policy decisions and the level of societal acceptance of risk and uncertainty. This chapter briefly takes stock of the fundamentals of risk regulation literature and proposes six topical themes that affect the future position of regulatory agencies – spanning from global crisis management to scientific integrity; from the regulation-innovation interface to enhancing government effectiveness through algorithmic regulation. The chapter then presents ideas on how to shape “Better Risk Regulation”, which will allow governments to adequately address the challenges and meet the opportunities of contemporary society.