Questioning the Neutrality of Procedural Law: Internet Regulation in Europe through the Lenses of Bourdieu's Notion of Symbolic Capital

Abstract: The main question addressed in this article concerns the role of law in regulating the Internet in Europe, while the focus is on the European Commission in the process. The thesis advanced is that Bourdieu's notion of capital may offer a view radically different to understanding regulatory law as objective and neutral, and to conceiving action as being initiated to achieve certain policy outcomes. Based on the assumption that power is at the heart of action, the argument is that the European Commission is predominantly engaged in struggles to remain a crucial locus of governance and maximise its power as a major think‐tank. To follow this intuition, this article questions the extent to which decentralised regulatory techniques have been effective in weakening mechanisms of control, as power may now be exercised in novel and less visible ways and thus be misrecognised. Unravelling the processes that disguise the effects of power will be done by virtue of three case studies: Architectural solutions introduced in software by the industry with the aim to combat illegal copying, domain names allocation by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and content regulation in the context of the Safer Internet Action Plan.