The EU approach to net neutrality: Network operators and over-the-top players,friends or foes?

This paper will mainly focus on the EU approach to net neutrality, notably the adequacy of existing and future EU rules to tackle the issue and the ongoing policy debate. It will also consider whether the market has effectively worked around the regulatory lacunae by looking into the relationships between the telecoms industry, as a regulated sector, and the over-the-top (OTT) players. In this regard, it will explore to what extent there is a real battle between telcos and OTTs or if both parties are already finding their own ways to overcome their (apparent) disputes.     

互联网金融视域下的类资产证券化:交易模式、金融异化与监管逻辑

为了规避监管或监管套利,互联网金融的类资产证券化创设了新的交易模式与法律结构:债权拆分流转、信托受益权拆分流转和资产收益权拆分流转。这突破传统的法律权利类型与法律边界,改变了传统的公募、私募监管逻辑,相关法律规制面临冲击和重构。对实质开展互联网资管业务的非金融类机构监管等领域的法律滞后与模糊,造成事实上的监管真空,引发金融乱象。金融监管应坚持实质重于形式的监管原则,强化穿透式监管,厘清互联网金融创新的法律边界,推进央地监管分工的法治化、体系化,消除监管空白,避免泛化式、运动式监管。     

Defining Environmental Justice Communities for Regulatory Enforcement: Implications from a Block‐Group‐Level Analysis of New York State

The absence of a clear definition of environmental justice areas has been cited as one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's major deficiencies in managing federal environmental justice programs. Several states have explicitly defined potential environmental justice areas and integrated targeted efforts into the policy‐making process. At the block‐group level, this study evaluates the effects of New York State's environmental justice policy, which defines communities of concern in terms of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics as well as mandates supplemental regulatory enforcement activities for these neighborhoods, on the agency's policy implementation practices under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. The empirical findings suggest that there is inconclusive evidence regarding race/ethnicity‐ and class‐based environmental inequity. Also, the state's policy intervention is not universally effective. Moreover, task environments of a given community are a consistent determinant of the agency's regulatory compliance monitoring and assurance activities. This study then derives broader implications regarding the adoption of a policy instrument that defines and screens potential environmental justice communities.     

The authoritarian logic of regulatory pluralism: Understanding China's new environmental actors

Over the last decade, Chinese citizens, judges, and prosecutors have started to take action against industrial pollution, pluralizing a regulatory landscape originally occupied by administrative agencies. Regulatory pluralism here has an authoritarian logic, occurring without the retreat of party‐state control. Under such logic, the party‐state both needs and fears new actors for their positive and negative roles in controlling risk and maintaining stability. Consequently, the regime's relation to regulatory pluralism is ambivalent, shifting between support and restriction. This prevents a development of a regulatory society that could bypass the regulatory state. Theoretically, this special edition argues for a subjective definition of regulation in a context of pluralism. Moreover, it finds that regulatory pluralism need not coincide with a decentring of regulation. Finally, it highlights how entry onto the regulatory landscape affects the non‐regulatory roles of new actors, creating unintended consequences for regulatory pluralism.     

Regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in urban China

In China, urban middle class mobilization against potential pollution risk has become increasingly common. This article examines this phenomenon through a detailed case study of a 2009 anti‐waste incinerator campaign in the Panyu District of Guangzhou, which culminated in a sizeable public protest and government U‐turn. This episode revealed tension between the narrow, state‐centered regulatory model fixated on end‐of‐pipe pollution control, and a much broader decentered approach advocated – and practiced – by project opponents, which incorporated public consultation and much greater emphasis on upstream waste reduction and sorting. In the process, the Panyu campaign progressed beyond a case of “regulation by escalation,” whereby beneficial regulations are belatedly enforced following populist pressure. Instead, it transformed into an open dialogue between a plurality of actors, including citizens, journalists, experts, and officials, about what regulation should constitute and who should determine acceptable levels of risk. By focusing on the processes through which regulatory issues emerged and changed during the Panyu campaign, this article highlights the regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in a context of regulatory uncertainty, and campaigns against “locally unwanted land uses” more broadly.     

The regulatory state in developing countries: Redistribution and regulatory failure in Brazil

Following the traditional doctrine of the “regulatory state”, regulatory agencies should be given very focused mandates and stay away from the politicized realm of distributive policies and decisions. An opposing perspective would state that if regulatory agencies can contribute to economic redistribution, positive results such as network expansion, economies of scale, and fiscal efficiency will ultimately lead to lower levels of regulatory failure. This article tests whether, in countries of high socio-economic inequality, such as Brazil, the active incorporation of distributive considerations by regulatory agencies leads to lower levels of failure. Through the analysis of the activities of seven Brazilian network regulatory agencies, the article develops theory-driven expectations and tests these expectations using crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA). It concludes that not prioritizing redistribution is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regulatory agencies' failure. In most types of failure, a lack of priority to redistribution leads to failure when combined with low regulatory capacity and low levels of competence.     

Tussle for space: The politics of mock-compliance with global financial standards in developing countries

As efforts to harmonize policies globally intensify, developing countries increasingly face pressures to adopt international standards. Yet, we know little about the circumstances under which developing countries manage to circumvent such pressures, or about their strategies to maintain policy space. We explore under which conditions developing countries are willing and able to sustain mock-compliance, a situation where countries comply on paper but not in practice. Using country comparisons of Angola's, Nigeria's, Tanzania's, and Vietnam's engagement with the Basel banking standards, we show how three factors combine to produce sustained mock-compliance: high costs of outright non-compliance due to outward-orientated banking sectors; high political costs of substantive compliance; and state control over profitable markets. Our article contributes to theory-building in the literature on compliance and structural power as well as to broader debates about developing countries' policy autonomy in their engagement with global financial norms.     

Still a poster child for social investment? Changing regulatory dynamics of early childhood education and care in Denmark and Sweden

This paper investigates the regulation of publicly organized early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Denmark and Sweden, through the regulatory welfare state (RWS) framework. The analysis focuses on how alterations in funding and quality of care are shaped by governmental and nongovernmental actors at national and local levels of government. Through focused structured analysis, we examine how various actors have shaped the funding and quality of childcare in Denmark and Sweden, from the early 2000s to 2020, with special attention to the period during and after the 2008 financial crisis. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, concerns about quality in care were raised on the political agenda by various actors in both countries, leading to decisions to improve the quality of care. Yet, the regulatory dynamics differ: In Denmark, the debate led to a decision in 2019, to implement a minimum statutory requirement of regulatory quality standards. From an RWS perspective, this outcome can be qualified as “double expansion,” because regulatory quality standards, and public funding for childcare increased. In Sweden, the debates about quality of ECEC led, in 2016, to political guidelines about quality standard, but with no additional national funds, and no mandatory regulatory quality requirements. Analytically, this can be qualified as “regulatory-led expansion,” that is requirements for quality standards, although the lack of additional national funds suggests that it will be difficult to improve ECEC quality substantially. The RWS perspective, which focuses on national and municipal levels of governance, also gives insights into hidden inequalities between municipalities regarding funding and quality of ECEC, which are more pronounced in Sweden than in Denmark.     

Globalization and regulatory change: The interplay of laws and technologies in E-commerce in Southeast Asia

Electronic commerce has brought about business and technological changes globally, and these global changes have given rise to major legal reforms across nations. In the fast-changing global digital economy, states need strategies to maintain competitiveness of their markets while simultaneously ensuring the secure and effective use of technologies involved in conducting electronic transactions. This paper examines how the use and recognition of electronic signatures are regulated in Southeast Asia – the region that has shown the most significant growth in global e-commerce in past few years. Based on a comparative analysis of the laws of four representative ASEAN member states – namely Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, this paper argues that there is a regional trend towards adopting more liberal and technology-neutral standards for electronic signatures. Electronic signature regulation in Southeast Asia is now built upon limited technological neutrality (or the so-called “two-tiered” approach) as a shared regulatory understanding, but this approach is operationalized differently in each state due to distinctive national contexts. Within the common legal framework, each state has developed its own system of control and management with respect to higher-level signatures (using advanced technologies). The principle of technological neutrality, a concept originally developed for the regulation of technologies in response to the liberalization of telecommunications market, has been the central theme of discussions on the e-transactions policy-making scene. As the author shows, in the process through which states localize the global standards of technological neutrality, ASEAN as a vehicle of regulatory change has played an essential role in translating this principle to the national context.     

Robots,standards and the law: Rivalries between private standards and public policymaking for robot governance

This article explains the complex intertwinement between public and private regulators in the case of robot technology. Public policymaking ensures broad multi-stakeholder protected scope, but its abstractness often fails in intelligibility and applicability. Private standards, on the contrary, are more concrete and applicable, but most of the times they are voluntary and reflect industry interests. The ‘better regulation’ approach of the EU may increase the use of evidence to inform policy and lawmaking, and the involvement of different stakeholders. Current hard-lawmaking instruments do not appear to take advantage of the knowledge produced by standard-based regulations, virtually wasting their potential benefits. This fact affects the legal certainty with regards to a fast-paced changing environment like robotics. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of overlapping public/private regulatory initiatives that govern robot technologies in general, and in the concrete of healthcare robot technologies. We wonder until what extent robotics should be governed only by standards. We also reflect on how public policymaking could increase their technical understanding of robot technology to devise an applicable and comprehensive framework for this technology. In this respect, we propose different ways to integrate the technical know-how into policymaking (e.g., collecting the data/knowledge generated from the impact assessments in shared data repositories, and using it for evidence-based policies) and to strengthen the legitimacy of standards.