The Ordering Power of Digital Infrastructures and Their Legal Regulation

Physical and informational infrastructures are increasingly enmeshed with digital infrastructures, associated flows of data and analytics, and new forms of digital power, competition, and control. Enhanced digitalization and connectivity of infrastructures can change the ways infrastructures regulate and how law might regulate infrastructures. Digital infrastructures themselves have major regulatory effects that have long been conceptualized under the idea that “code is law” but the transnational dimensions of this insight have been largely overlooked. In the early 21st century, global digital economy companies have emerged as the major drivers and governors of the digital world. The extent to which public law is able to respond to exponential, permission-less, and easy to scale digital innovation has major implications for global governance, equality, and democracy.