In 2024, we will see courts and legislators around the world demonstrate that technological exceptionalism is magical thinking when it comes to applying legal rules. The tide is now beginning to turn on the assumption that law and regulation cannot keep pace with technological innovation. But, in 2024, there will be a sea change: not through new rules, but old rules aggressively applied to new problems.
In the US, in the absence of federal privacy laws, regulators have already begun to change the laws and regulations they have in place to address some of the catastrophic examples of big tech playing fast and loose with our rights and personal data. In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory scope of consumer protection regulations.
The problem of dark patterns — the deceptive design used by apps and websites to trick users into doing something they didn’t intend to do, such as buying or subscribing to something — was covered by a half-billion-dollar fine. Fortnite Created by Epic Games. The FTC also issued huge fines to Amazon for significant privacy violations through Alexa devices and doorbells. There’s no sign that the FTC will slow down in 2024 with rules governing business surveillance and digital security. In 2024, we will see regulators in other fields and other parts of the world follow suit, bolstered by the FTC’s successes.
In 2022, the French data protection authority, the CNIL, fined Clearview AI €20 million for failing to comply with an earlier ruling in 2021 that ordered the company to stop collecting and using French-language data on individuals. (about 21.9 million dollars) fined. Territory in 2023, further deferred penalties will increase to millions of euros. In 2024, we will see regulators like the CNIL take even more radical legal action to show that no company is above the law.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kicked off 2023 by calling for global AI regulation, but glossed over the actual prospect of EU regulation in the form of an EU AI law. While AI detractors called for a halt to innovation to allow regulation to catch up, regulators including Italy’s DPA found ways to clip their wings by stopping ChatGPT in their territory, albeit temporarily, with existing regulations. Ongoing intellectual property litigation, such as the one against Microsoft that accuses the company of illegally using code created by others, could lead to a turbulent 2024 for the basic business model of artificial intelligence.
It’s not just the individual effects of technology that courts and lawmakers have in mind. In 2024, they will also consider its effects on society, markets and businesses. For example, antitrust measures in the United States and the European Union, set to launch in 2023, will challenge Google’s dominance of the ad tech market and potentially undermine the unified logic of the programmatic advertising model that helped build the Internet. Today we know it has helped, it shakes.
In 2024, we will see the regulatory vacuum that Big Tech has long enjoyed come to an end. While new laws and regulations such as the Artificial Intelligence Act, Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act are beginning to take shape in the EU, courts and legislators are trying to apply existing rules and regulations to the new ways that technology affects our daily lives. affects, they will continue. We will see the widespread presence of legal tools to deal with challenges. Human rights and civil liberties law, competition law, consumer law, intellectual property, defamation, tort, employment law, and many other areas to deal with real-life harms already caused by existing technologies, including artificial intelligence. is created, they will be involved.
