RSM welcomes Chinmayi Arun, Anupam Chander, and Haochen Sun for a conversation launching Data Sovereignty: From the Digital Silk Road to the Return of the State, a new open access volume from Professors Chander and Sun.
Digital sovereignty—the exercise of control over the Internet—is the ambition of the world’s leaders, from Australia to Zimbabwe, a bulwark against both foreign state and foreign corporation. Governments have resoundingly answered first-generation Internet law questions of who if anyone should regulate the Internet—they all will. The second-generation question to confront is not whether, but how to regulate the Internet. This volume features new theoretical perspectives on digital sovereignty and explores cutting-edge issues associated with it. Drawing mainly on various theories concerning political economy, international law, human rights, and data protection, it presents thought-provoking ideas about the nature and scope of digital sovereignty. It also examines the extent to which new technological developments in sectors, such as artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and sharing economy, have posed challenges to assertion of digital sovereignty, and considers how to deal with such challenges. In particular, the volume discusses the promise and pitfalls of digital sovereignty in the process of trade liberalization, data localization, and human rights protection.
Chinmayi Arun is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and a Lecturer in Law and Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on platform governance, social media, algorithmic decision-making, the data economy and privacy, within the larger universe of questions raised by law’s relationship with the information society. She is interested in how these questions affect marginalized populations, especially in the Majority World.
Anupam Chander is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University. Author of The Electronic Silk Road (Yale University Press), he is a gradate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. He clerked for Second Circuit Chief Judge Jon Newman and Ninth Circuit Judge William Norris. He practiced law in New York and Hong Kong with Cleary Gottlieb. He has been a visiting law professor at Yale, Chicago, Stanford, Cornell, and Tsinghua. He is a Vice President of the Georgetown University Senate.
Haochen Sun is a Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and an expert on intellectual property, technology law, and Chinese law. His monograph Technology and the Public Interest (Cambridge University Press) puts forward a new theoretical approach to protecting the right to technology and enforcing technology companies’ fundamental responsibilities. His opinions about law and technology have appeared in media outlets, such as BBC News, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In spring 2023, he served as a Short-Term International Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School.