This seminar will be held online on Zoom. You can register here.

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About the book

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology examines the ideological origins, societal implications, and the relative global influence of three contrasting regulatory approaches toward the digital economy: the American market-driven regulatory model, the Chinese state-driven regulatory model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model. These three models reflect different theories about the relationship between markets, the state, and individual and collective rights. They also frequently collide in an international domain, leading to a contested battle over the present and future ethos of the digital economy. The book discusses how governments and tech companies navigate these inevitable conflicts that arise when these contrasting regulatory approaches collide in the international domain, ultimately asking which digital empire will prevail in their mutual contest for global influence. These regulatory conflicts take place at the moment of time when digital societies are at an inflection point. The cascade of digital regulation that is now being drafted around the world will be crucial in shaping the digital economy and digital society for years and decades to come. Governments, technology companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society and define the soul of the digital economy. This book lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explain the forces that shape those choices, and spell out the stakes involved in making those choices.

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About Anu Bradford

A leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and a sought-after commentator on the European Union, global economy, and digital regulation, Anu Bradford coined the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsize influence on global markets. Most recently, she is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her next book Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology will be published by the OUP in September 2023.

Bradford is also an expert in international antitrust law. She spearheads the Comparative Competition Law Project, which has built a comprehensive global data set of antitrust laws and enforcement across time and jurisdictions. The project, a joint effort between the Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, covers more than a century of regulation in over 100 countries and has been the basis for Bradford’s recent empirical research on the antitrust regimes used to regulate markets.

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2012, Bradford was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also practiced EU and antitrust law in Brussels and has served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. The World Economic Forum named her Young Global Leader ’10.

At the Law School, Bradford is the director of the European Legal Studies Center, which trains students for leadership roles in European law, public affairs, and the global economy. She is also a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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