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Veranstaltung

22.05.2019

14:00 Uhr - 15:30 Uhr | Weizenbaum-Institut, Hardenbergstraße 32, 10623 Berlin

Natasha Tusikov: Chokepoints – Internet Platforms as Global Regulators

In her talk, Natasha Tusikov (York University, Canada) considers the ways in which non-state actors rely upon the state to facilitate or legitimize their regulatory efforts and explores the state’s interests in furthering certain types of non-state regulation.

With the Cambridge Analytica scandal, global attention has focused on the surveillance-capitalist businesses of internet platforms. Those with large, global operations, such as Google, PayPal, eBay and the China-based Alibaba, have a considerable capacity to make and enforce rules for their services that can affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given their sophisticated surveillance programs, these platforms are important regulators for states and, increasingly, for corporations, particularly in relation to the protection of intellectual property.

In this presentation Natasha Tusikov considers the ways in which non-state actors rely upon the state to facilitate or legitimize their regulatory efforts and explores the state’s interests in furthering certain types of non-state regulation. She examines a series of informal enforcement agreements that Internet firms adopted at the behest of the U.S. government and European Commission. These secretly negotiated agreements are fundamentally reshaping regulatory efforts against the online distribution of counterfeit goods and fundamentally affecting internet governance.

Natasha Tusikov is assistant professor of criminology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research examines the intersection among law, crime, technology, and regulation, and she is the author of Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet (University of California Press, 2017). She is the principle investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant examining smart cities and data governance (2019-2021). She is also a co-investigator on the SSHRC Insight Development Grant “Internet Governance, Intellectual Property and the Exercise of Power in the 21st Century” (2016-2019). Her study on Internet firms’ sharing of personal information and the implications for Canadians’ privacy received funding from the Contributions Program at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (2016-2017). Before obtaining her PhD at the Australian National University, she was a strategic criminal intelligence analyst and researcher at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa.