Reimagining Electronic Communications Regulatory Environment with AI: Self-Regulation Embedded in ‘Techno-Regulation’
Abstract
In 2019, Roger Brownsword published a book in which he described the transformation of regulatory environments via technology and the reimagining of legal values and legal rules that must accompany this transformation. In ‘techno-regulation’ the regulator expects a perfect control and elimination of non-compliance by employing a particular technology, whereas regulatees may have only a limited capacity to damage, disrupt and circumvent the technology put in place. This paper demonstrates how Brownsword’s description of ‘techno-regulation’ matches current trends in radio spectrum management and argues that radio spectrum management is the precursor of all technologically managed environments.
The paper identifies the normative and non-normative dimensions of technologically regulated radio spectrum and comments on the specificities of radio spectrum as a technologically managed environment. It assesses the driving forces behind the current trends in radio spectrum management, as well as the regulatory fitness of ‘techno-regulatory’ approaches to radio spectrum management. Finally, the paper describes how regulatees attempt to disrupt, hack or otherwise compromise the technology deployed by the regulator, and how radio spectrum management achieves control over compliance in the transformed environment
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