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ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Communications Daily in a story about the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed 5G Fund order. You can read the full piece here.

Kristian Stout, director-innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, said without text it’s difficult to form “strong opinions” on the 5G Fund. “When there are items like this under consideration there is no good reason not to release them to the public as they are being considered,” Stout said.

ICLE Academic Affiliate Christopher Yoo was cited in a post at The Volokh Conspiracy about his recent piece dissecting problems with the argument that social-media platforms should be treated as common carriers. You can read the full piece here.

University of Pennsylvania law Prof. Christopher Yoo recently published an article that is the most thorough takedown of the common carrier theory so far. Here is the abstract…

…I agree with almost all of Yoo’s analysis. In particular, I think he is right that social media firms don’t fit any of the traditional rationales for common carrier status, and that states cannot simply create such status by legislative fiat (or at least, if they do, it cannot override constitutional constraints on their regulatory authority).

For all my carping about this or that program or enforcement matter, it seems to me a very good thing that Congress passed—and President Joe Biden signed into law—the spending package that will keep much of the federal government up and running for Fiscal Year 2024 (see here for the news, and here and here for a couple of the consolidated appropriations bills just signed into law).

Read the full piece here.

ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was quoted by The Oregonian on Portland voters unwillingness to raise property taxes to support the public school system. You can read the full piece here.

Voters are acutely aware of a host of other local and regional taxes and levies that have won approval in the past five years, some of which have been slow to yield measurable results, said Eric Fruits, an economics professor at Portland State University who has sent four children to Portland’s public schools.

ICLE Academic Affiliate Liya Palagashvili was a guest on the Free the Economy podcast to discuss  jobs, full- and part-time jobs, contractors, gig work, California’s Assembly Bill 5, recent U.S. Labor Department rules, and flexible workplace benefits. Video of the full interview is embedded below.

Abstract

The ChatGPT chatbot has not just caught the public imagination; it is also amplifying concern across industry, academia, and government policymakers interested in the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) about how to understand the risks and threats associated with AI applications. Following the release of ChatGPT, some EU regulators proposed changes to the EU AI Act to classify AI systems like ChatGPT that generate complex texts without any human oversight as “high-risk” AI systems that would fall under the law’s requirements. That classification was a controversial one, with other regulators arguing that technologies like ChatGPT, which merely generate text, are “not risky at all.” This controversy risks disrupting coherent discussion and progress toward formulating sound AI regulations for Large Language Models (LLMs), AI, or ICTs more generally. It remains unclear where ChatGPT fits within AI and where AI fits within the larger context of digital policy and the regulation of ICTs in spite of nascent efforts by OECD.AI and the EU.

This paper aims to address two research questions around AI policy: (1) How are LLMs like ChatGPT shifting the policy discussions around AI regulations? (2) What lessons can regulators learn from the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other data protection policymaking efforts that can be applied to AI policymaking?

The first part of the paper addresses the question of how ChatGPT and other LLMs have changed the policy discourse in the EU and other regions around regulating AI and what the broader implications for these shifts may be for AI regulation more widely. This section reviews the existing proposal for an EU AI Act and its accompanying classification of high-risk AI systems, considers the changes prompted by the release of ChatGPT and examines how LLMs appear to have altered policymakers’ conceptions of the risks presented by AI. Finally, we present a framework for understanding how the security and safety risks posed by LLMs fit within the larger context of risks presented by AI and current efforts to formulate a regulatory framework for AI.

The second part of the paper considers the similarities and differences between the proposed AI Act and GDPR in terms of (1) organizations being regulated, or scope, (2) reliance on organizations’ self-assessment of potential risks, or degree of self-regulation, (3) penalties, and (4) technical knowledge required for effective enforcement, or complexity. For each of these areas, we consider how regulators scoped or implemented GDPR to make it manageable, enforceable, meaningful, and consistent across a wide range of organizations handling many different kinds of data as well as the extent to which they were successful in doing so. We then examine different ways in which those same approaches may or may not be applicable to the AI Act and the ways in which AI may prove more difficult to regulate than issues of data protection and privacy covered by GDPR. We also look at the ways in which AI may make it more difficult to enforce and comply with GDPR since the continued evolution of AI technologies may create cybersecurity tools and threats that will impact the efficacy of GDPR and privacy policies. This section argues that the extent to which the proposed AI Act relies on self-regulation and the technical complexity of enforcement are likely to pose significant challenges to enforcement based on the implementation of the most technologically and self-regulation-focused elements of GDPR.

ICLE Senior Scholar Lazar Radic was quoted by ExchangeWire in a story about how other jurisdictions are looking to copy the EU’s Digital Markets Act. You can read the full piece here.

ICLE’s Lazar Radic calls what the DMA is trying to achieve ‘the Brussels effect’ – “a regulatory contagion from the EU to other places. This would turn it into something like what you have called “the world’s digital police,” at least within the boundaries of the conduct covered by the DMA,” he explains.

…For advertisers, adapting to managing additional silos can further complicate an already tricky task. With the fragmentation of tracking and profiling individuals at scale without relying on third-party data, which is frequently stored in third-party cookies, many marketers are already grappling with this challenge. Radic describes this as “…clearly designed to drive a wedge in gatekeepers’ ad tech model, preventing them from cross-using data between a core platform services and any other service provided by the gatekeeper – for example, between an online search engine, a messaging app, and a social networking app.”

…“Gatekeeper’s ad tech might become less effective, and their ads less relevant. This hurts gatekeepers. In turn, given gatekeepers’ loss of control of advertising on their own platforms, end-users might be exposed to more irrelevant, random advertising noise from third-parties,” explains Radic. “This hurts consumers. The DMA could also impact gatekeepers’ incentives to invest in their platform, seeing as how the regulation purposefully facilitates third parties from free-riding on those investments. This, in the end, hurts everyone.”

ICLE hosted a one-day Public Choice Bootcamp preceding the 61st Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society. Our group consisted of law professors, economists, and a PhD student. The purpose of this workshop was to provide a “bootcamp”-style introduction to Public Choice Economics that will enable participating academics to meaningfully engage with public choice scholars and scholarship, as well as to facilitate research collaborations between scholars from both fields.

PORTLAND, Ore. (Mar. 27, 2024) – The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) is excited to announce its second year of Speakers Series Grants to support law & economics scholarship on campus. These grants allow recipients to bring several speakers to their campus over the course of the academic year to present current scholarship.

In evaluating proposals for the 2024-2025 academic year, we will place special emphasis on bringing new voices into the law & economics community, including both more junior scholars and scholars from cognate disciplines such as business and engineering.

Proposals should include a list of potential invited speakers, a copy of your CV, and a short paragraph noting reasons you believe such a series will be well-received at your school, any challenges you anticipate facing, and opportunities you may have for speakers to engage with non-law faculty or students.

This program is modeled on workshop series common in law schools. That is not, however, intended to prescribe a format necessary to receive support through this program. We welcome applications from both law and non-law faculty, and encourage faculty to submit applications for support of programs that “break the mold” described in this call for proposals.

Typical awards will be $10,000. Awards will be made as a gift to the recipient’s school, restricted for the use of a speakers series with speakers identified at the sole discretion of the award recipient. Speakers invited to this series should be given the same level of support afforded to any other speaker invited to your school (e.g., in terms of room availability, promotion, scheduling, etc). The precise administration of funds shall be at the discretion of the recipient. ICLE would anticipate the funds being used to support speakers’ travel and hotel costs, food and promotional materials, and a group dinner with the speaker. ICLE does not allow overhead to be charged against gifts of this size.

At the end of each semester, award recipients should report to ICLE the names and affiliations of speakers and the number of faculty and students who attended their presentations (including their disciplines if they are not all law faculty and students). At the end of the academic year, award recipients should report to ICLE the amount of unspent funds.

ICLE is planning to execute these series starting in Fall 2024, but is open to proposals that envision an earlier timeline. 

Please submit your proposal to [email protected] by Friday, May 31, 2024.