Undersea communication cables are the core critical infrastructure of the digital age. 99% of all transoceanic digital communication—financial transactions, emails, or voice messaging—is transporte...

Protecting hidden infrastructure: The security politics of the global submarine data cable network

How does the market for cryptocurrencies respond to the outbreak of a global crisis, such as the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? On the one hand, cryptocurrencies are supported by a decentralized mechanism, which is independent of governmental functions and available anywhere in the world. Thus, people may respond to global instability by switching from traditional markets to the cryptomarket. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies may be intertwined with economic activity and particularly vulnerable to manipulations by sophisticated investors, leading to crashes in the cryptomarket. Analyzing data on the top 100 cryptocurrencies, we find that the inflow of Coronavirus cases is, on average, positively associated with the market cap and trade volume of cryptocurrencies. However, we also find that an opposite trend emerged once Coronavirus cases started accumulating, eventually leading to a decline in the cryptomarket. We highlight the fact that these findings may be consistent with a market failure, either because investors falsely believe that the cryptomarket is a safe haven during a crisis or because the market movements are attributable to malicious behavior (pump-and-dump schemes or criminal behavior). Given Our findings, we discuss the different rationales for regulating the cryptomarket and identify challenges for regulatory interventions.

How Crisis Affects Crypto: Coronavirus as a Test Case

Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology-intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio-political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology-centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer-standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under-recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology-led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under-recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi-stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology-led multi-stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long-standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.

Interrogating Technology-led Experiments in Sustainability Governance.

ABSTRACT “Digital sovereignty” has emerged as a hot topic in European politics. But although true European digital sovereignty seems unattainable, analysing the digital sovereignty discourse is still useful since it tells us much about European politics. We examine three “projects” which are part of the broader digital sovereignty initiative: 5G, Gaia-X, and the semiconductor industry. This empirical perspective allows for a better understanding of how imaginaries about digital sovereignty play out in these specific tech projects and how these then help to affirm a particular European identity. Methodologically, we focus on how particular geopolitical imaginaries appear in these digital sovereignty projects. Our empirical analysis reveals that Europe’s comparatively weak digital industries are considered a security issue. China and, to a lesser degree, the United States are not only seen as economic rivals but also security threats when it comes to issues such as espionage and data protection. Based on this, we argue that digital sovereignty projects, despite being full of contradictions and tensions, contribute to a distinct EU identity of an agile, future-oriented global player in the digitised economy. This, while not entirely new, is a powerful imaginary even if the proposed idea of “sovereignty” might never be enacted.

Digital sovereignty, geopolitical imaginaries, and the reproduction of European identity

Low-Touch Economy is emerging due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused dramatic changes in all aspects of society including the way business is operating. The lockdown policies aiming at avoiding the spread of the new coronavirus in almost every country led to disruptions in business continuity.The aim of this paper is to overview a new concept of Low-Touch Economy and its possible implications on Business Models in connection with the Digital Economy. The article also outlines the concept in light of the circular and sharing economic theories. The exploratory research approach allows reviewing the current literature and gathering secondary data about Low-Touch Economy and its implications on business dealings. The Bibliographic research of recent works shows the role of the Low-Touch Economy and Digital Economy in searching for new business models and their potential to accelerate economic recovery after the pandemic.The article concludes by suggesting that organizations should adapt their business models to the new reality. It contributes to a current ongoing discussion on ways out of the crisis. This article fulfills an identified need to study how Low-Touch Economy along with Digital Economy can help the business to continue operations during the pandemic and how the concepts underpinning business models can enable fast economic recovery. Future empirical research will reveal the capability of the Low Touch Economy in different industries as well as various countries around the globe.

New economic concepts shaping business models in post-pandemic era

Digital technologies are often described as posing unique challenges for public regulators worldwide. Their fast-pace and technical nature are viewed as being incompatible with the relatively slow and territorially bounded public regulatory processes. In this paper, we argue that not all digital technologies pose the same challenges for public regulators. We more precisely maintain that the digital technologies' label can be quite misleading as it actually represents a wide variety of technical artifacts. Based on two dimensions, the level of centralization and (im)material nature, we provide a typology of digital technologies that importantly highlights how different technical artifacts affect differently local, national, regional and global distributions of power. While some empower transnational businesses, others can notably reinforce states' power. By emphasizing this, our typology contributes to ongoing discussions about the global regulation of a digital economy and helps us identify the various challenges that it might present for public regulators globally. At the same time, it allows us to reinforce previous claims that these are importantly, not all new and that they often require us to solve traditional cooperation problems.

/pdf/global-regulations-for-a-digital-economy-between-new-and-old-303qkhjpci.pdf

Falin Zhang

Papers

Global Regulations for a Digital Economy: Between New and Old Challenges