Private Power Online: Examining the EU’s competition investigation into Google’s search and advertising activities

Date: November 23, 2016 (Wed)

Time: 1pm – 2pm

Venue: Room 723, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, HKU

Speaker: Dr. Angela Daly, Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology

Abstract: The emergence of very large transnational private companies which provide critical Internet infrastructure and services has brought with it corresponding concerns about the power of these companies to control, surveil and otherwise influence our communications. Many of these companies also gather vast amounts of data by and about their users – a bank of data which has proved attractive to the public power of nation-states’ security and law enforcement agencies, which have accessed it in less than transparent and legitimate ways, as Edward Snowden’s revelations from 2013 attest.

Against this backdrop, and adopting a socio-legal methodology, this presentation considers the ongoing proceedings against Google in the European Union for the alleged abuse of its dominant position in the market for online search. Through the prism of this case, broader issues around the governance of online private power will be explored, including the extent to which existing EU legal and regulatory frameworks are able to protect individual Internet users’ interests vis-à-vis these actors.

About the speaker: Dr Angela Daly is Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in QUT’s Faculty of Law, a research associate in the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society and a an adjunct research fellow in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. She is a socio-legal scholar of technology and is the author of Socio-Legal Aspects of the 3D Printing Revolution (Palgrave 2016) and Mind The Gap: Private Power, Online Information Flows and EU Law (Hart 2016).

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