Regulators across the globe are rushing to ramp up their regulatory frameworks to rein in and deal with Big Tech and AI. Brussels has seized first-mover status and already rolled out a dense corpus of digital acts. The move has stirred controversy. While firms and users may face higher costs, doubts about regulatory effectiveness linger. Other jurisdictions advance with more restraint and probe how to retool their legal frameworks for a digital age. As competing models emerge, the puzzle remains: how to regulate meaningfully?
Today, we are pleased to announce a special issue titled “The Law & Technology & Economics of AI,” soon to appear in the Network Law Review. Before unveiling its contributions, a few words on the rationale that guided its conception.
First, our main objective has been to stage a multidisciplinary forum on the tangled frontier of law, technology, and the economics of artificial intelligence. This is not another academic roundtable. It is about putting disciplines into collision (law, economics, computer science), deliberately creating friction, and seeing (what) sparks fly. The contributors span backgrounds, geographies, and generations. That diversity is not cosmetic. It is meant to cut across the silos of doctrinal analysis, econometric formalism, and technical reductionism. The hope is that friction moves us beyond talking points, closer to workable ideas for regulation and reform.
Second, the pieces gathered here are not op-eds. They hold a scholarly line. The output is a set of arguments that inform, rather than inflame, current debates. Without techno-doom. And without techno-utopia. Some authors probe how institutions we already have (competition agencies, IP courts, data protection boards) might be redesigned and redeployed. The suggestion here is that the frontier of AI governance may lie as much in retooling old machinery as in drafting new rules. Others look elsewhere, exploring and testing novel avenues for research and trialing experimental designs.
Third, a workshop took place on May 22–23, 2025, in beautiful Hong Kong, hosted by Adrian Kuenzler (HKU Law School), Thibault Schrepel (Amsterdam Law & Technology Institute at the VU Amsterdam), and Volker Stocker (Weizenbaum Institute). All contributors to this special issue participated in person. We thank HKU Law School and the HKU Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies for their generous support.
Now for substance. When we reached out to contributors, we asked them to wrestle with questions like:
- Do institutions need to be reconfigured or new ones created to establish the requisite flexibility and (multidisciplinary) capacity to effectively govern AI?
- Is the existence of multiple regulatory approaches in different jurisdictions conducive to finding the most effective regulatory approach to AI governance?
- What are the benefits and costs of competition between new and existing regulatory bodies, of overlapping jurisdictions across different subject areas and of multiple layers of governance?
- To which extent are adaptive, flexible, and more robust regulatory techniques better able to address concerns in the technology space?
In response, we received a series of first-rate contributions. Each tackles a live issue at the intersection of law, technology, and the economics of AI. Below, we list the contributors and their pieces, in the order of planned publication. Titles and details may shift as we move forward.
- “Toward Compliance Zero: AI and the Vanishing Costs of Regulatory Compliance,” by Paul Ohm (Georgetown University Law Center)
- “Artificial Intelligence and Data Policies: Regulatory Overlaps and Economic Tradeoffs,” by Ginger Zhe Jin (University of Maryland), Liad Wagman (Illinois Institute of Technology), and Mengyi Zhong (University of Maryland)
- “The Regulation that Cried Wolf: Generative AI Training Data and the Challenge of Lawful Scale,” by Alba Ribera Martínez (University Villanueva)
- “Governing Hyperobjects: The New Economics of AI Regulation,” by Jason Potts (Alfaisal University / MIT)
- “Dams for the Infinite River: Limits to Copyright’s Power over the Next Generation of Generative AI Media,” by Zachary Cooper (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
- “AI Governance as Regulation of Collective Memory,” by Michal Shur-Ofry (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
- “Statutory Obsolescence in the Age of Innovation: A Few Thoughts about GDPR,” by Florence G’sell (Stanford University)
- “Crafting the Regulatory Ecosystem for AI: Competition 2.0,” by Nuno Cunha Rodrigues (Portuguese Competition Agency / University of Lisbon)
- “Japanese AI Regulation and Competition Law,” by Kyohei Yamamoto (Japan Fair Trade Commission) and Yasunori Tabei (Japan Fair Trade Commission)
- “The New AI Regulation in Korea: Problems of Jurisdictional Overlaps,” by Yo Sop Choi (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul)
- “Implementing the European AI Act: Balancing Horizontal Consistency with Sector-Specific Requirements,” by Daniel Schnurr (University of Regensburg)
- “Personalized Competition Law: The New Frontier of AI Market Governance,” by Adrian Kuenzler (University of Hong Kong)
- “Principal-Agent Dynamics & Digital (Platform) Economics in the Age of Agentic AI,” by Volker Stocker (Weizenbaum Institute / TU Berlin) and William Lehr (MIT)
- “Teaching Dead Laws to Govern Living AI Systems,” by Thibault Schrepel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam / Stanford CodeX)
Taken together, these essays suggest that AI governance will not be solved by more rules alone, but by re-wiring the interconnected circuits of law, economics, and technology.
