This issue of the International Review of Law, Computers & Technology presents some of the best papers from the 2020 annual BILETA conference,Footnote1 which was the first year that the conference was held online. Online hosting was not, of course, the intention but the circumstances of the global pandemic changed BILETA's conference plans.
Prof. Eleni Kosta, a long-standing member of BILETA, had kindly volunteered to host the conference at Tilburg University, and attendees were very much looking forward to it. Eleni and her colleagues, Dr Leonie Reins, and Femke Abousalama-de Graaff (events coordinator) had, with the support of Prof Ronald Leenes (Head of Law School) and colleagues at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT), spent many months preparing for it, and had developed a wonderful conference programme on the theme of ‘Regulating Transitions in Technology and Law’, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck and forced a change of plans. They valiantly keep the situation under review for a few weeks until it became clear that the pandemic would not be short and fleeting. We remain indebted to our Tilburg colleagues for their sterling efforts and sincerely hope to be able to visit and express our gratitude in person when the pandemic abates.
Despite the challenges of pandemic-induced alterations, we are pleased to report that many attendees accepted the invite to attend the conference virtually and that the online conference platform lent itself to interesting discussions – something we were initially unsure about – evidently, we had not made the most of Zoom, Teams, and other video-conferencing apps in pre-pandemic times! This special issue brings together articles considering the relationship between regulation, data, and transitional regulation, and contains four papers all touching on this theme.
We begin with Schmitz-Berndt and Schiffner's article, which discusses incident notification responsibilities under the Network and Information Systems Directive and General Data Protection Regulation and sets out the goals of each and how they are aligned. Thereafter they provide illustrative examples to highlight that a single incident can give rise to reporting responsibilities under both legislative instruments, to different regulators. Moreover, the reporting requirements for one (i.e. without undue delay under the GDPR) could undermine the efficacy of investigating an incident for NIS purposes. They consider the interplay between the two legal instruments in order to give broader sectoral advice on compliance with notification requirements.
Ziolkowska reviews the notion of state sovereignty and the concepts of internal and external control and authority before questioning whether blockchain technology poses a systemic threat to the traditional understanding of state sovereignty. She explores features of blockchain technology that could challenge traditional law making and enforcement processes and perhaps make them redundant, before explaining that these are not firm predictions because the future of this technology and its impact is not yet certain.
Whilst some articles in this issue focus on the role and impact of technology and others on legal instruments in addressing challenges, the article by Richards & Eboibi provocatively question whether corruption explains to a significant degree the proliferation of cybercrime in private and public institutions in Africa. It offers interesting examples of how and why cybercriminals operate with impunity before suggesting practical solutions to address the problem, and seeks to challenge conventional approaches to understanding cybercrime across African jurisdictions. The discussion here offers a fresh consideration of how cybercrime could be tackled. For those less familiar with cybercriminality, it will prove thought provoking!
Celeste meanwhile argues that social media have become an essential tool for exercising our fundamental rights, including freedom of expression. For this reason, curtailing access to social media should, he argues, be subject to minimal constitutional safeguards. He analyses recent case law from the US and Germany in order to examine whether their national courts have established that internal rules of social media platforms, such as those related to the possibility of blocking or banning users, should be balanced with freedom of expression and cognate rights, and should respect the minimal constitutional principles proper of criminal law, such as legality and proportionality.
The 2020 conference theme – and this special edition – focuses on ‘Regulating Transitions’. As 2021 unfolds, transitions within the field of legal studies remain central. The papers in this special issued – edited by Dr Karen McCullagh, Dr Kim Barker & Mr Gavin Sutter – all focus on futures of technology and transitions to different regulatory norms. All of the papers here therefore address in some part ‘transitions’ – a fitting issue reflecting both the online conference, but also 2020.
Notes
1 Other papers presented have been published in the European Journal of Law and Technology.