Publications

Book Review: Digital Empires. The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (2023)

This book offers an in-depth, objective analysis of the three dominant regulatory models for digitalization—market-driven by the US, state-driven by China, and citizen-driven by the EU—and their global impacts on data, digital platforms, and the internet, highlighting the current geo-political struggles and possible future scenarios.

Book Review: Trafficking Data. How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (2023)

This book explores China's agenda to establish itself as a cyber superpower through their strategic data governance approach, which, the author Aynne Kokas suggests, could pose a threat to global data autonomy.

Report: Digitaler Service Public Workshop

This report summarizes the key results of the 2. Workshop on Digital Service Public held with 20 stakeholders from Swiss public administration, politics, industry, interest groups, civil society and academia.

Working Paper: Digitaler Service Public

As part of our work on the digital public service in Switzerland, we have written an initial working paper in which we focused in particular on the question of the future of the traditional service public in the context of progressive platformization.

Issue Brief: International Rulemaking for Tech

In this issue brief, C4DT Digital Trust Policy Fellow Leonila Guglya examines international digital product regulations that are of key relevance to the ICT community, such as mandatory disclosure of source code, use of cryptography, cybersecurity standards, and nondiscrimination rules.

Book Review: The Digital Republic. On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (2022)

In this book lawyer Jamie Susskind addresses the issue of the unaccountable power exerted by Big Tech. Susskind problematizes the fundamental challenges that the engineers who design and control digital technology pose to democratic power and legitimacy.

Book Review: The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World (2018)

This book provides and excellent analysis of how digital platforms have become so powerful and so pervasive that they have by now permeated every corner of society and social life to the point that they determine, at least in part, the way society operates.

Book Review: Platform Regulation. Exemplars, Approaches and Solutions (2023)

This recent book by Pradip Ninan Thomas approaches the phenomenon of digital platforms, digitalization, and Big Tech from a non-Western, cultural perspective, which makes it a very welcome contribution to the study of digitalization.

Book Review: Data Cartels. The Companies That Control and Monopolize our Information (2023)

This extremely well documented and researched book introduces the reader to some novel areas of platformization, namely the platformization of actors that manage information, knowledge and intelligence.

Book Review: The Rise of the New Network Industries (2021)

Juan Montero and Matthias Finger's book provides a valuable exploration of digital platforms' ascent and impacts, addressing their market disruption and potential regulatory strategies for mitigating adverse effects.

Book Review: Cloud Empires (2022)

In this book Lehdonvirta powerfully argues that we we are mistaken to consider digital platforms as being businesses that operate in a market. Rather, they are “governments” or “virtual states”, with the only difference being that their leaders enjoy immense power without a commensurate level of accountability.

Book Review: Click Here to Kill Everybody (2018)

In “Click here to Kill Everybody”, computer security, privacy, and cryptography specialist Bruce Schneier argues for the pressing need for greater internet security in the wake of the unrelenting expansion of the Internet into our physical world, specifically the Internet of Things (IoT).

Book Review: Ruling the Root (2002)

Milton Mueller’s, by now, classic on the history of internet governance is a meticulously researched, documented, and analyzed a work and can arguably be considered is a masterpiece of the social and political history of technology.