Legal Challenges of the Data Economy: Welcome remarks, with Hubert du Mesnil, Nicolas Bauquet, Florence G’sell and Omri Ben-Shahar

Presented at the Legal Challenges of the Data Economy conference, March 22, 2019.

Transcript

HUBERT DU MESNIL: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great honor for me as the director of this institution to welcome you all today to the College de Bernardins for this international conference on the Legal Challenges of the Data Economy. I am very happy to host such an exceptional panel of speakers with professors and practitioners from different parts of the world.

I believe that what makes this even extremely valuable is threefold. First, the study of the impact of data and technology on our society has become crucial. We collectively lack knowledge about the ongoing revolution that's disrupting the way we live, the way we interact together, the way we define ourselves as human beings.

Digital literacy is now a key societal issue. Civil society needs to be able to understand what's at stake. Decision-makers need to fully grasp the extent of this challenge in order to promote new regulations that do not stifle innovation, and at the same time, protect users and citizens.

Among the topics to be discussed in our four panels today, we have first, the role of algorithms in governing society. Two, the ethical issues they raise. Three, the challenges to competition and antitrust policy. And four, the economics of data. This conference aims to tackle these topics, and it does so, which brings me to my second point, through a transdisciplinary approach.

Bringing together, scholars and makers from different backgrounds, economy, technology, law, philosophy, is quite compulsory. We can no longer work in silo. Hard science needs humanities and vise versa to gain awareness about the multifaceted aspects of these complex trends.

At the College de Bernardins, we strive to develop such a transdisciplinary approach in the department Le humanisme numerique headed by Gemma Serrano. Its six programs aim to explore the deep and complex transformations of our digital world by using materials, theoretical tools and concepts explored by theologians, philosophers and practitioners in the long run of Christianity. We also really offer free events to a larger audience to educate everyone on the rising concerns and opportunities brought about by the digital world.

The College de Bernardins stands as a place for open discussion and innovation. In that regard, I'm especially delighted that the organizers of this event managed to gather speakers from various fields of expertises, which leads me to my third and final point. Today is also a wonderful opportunity for thinkers from the United States and from Europe to share their perspectives and debate matters about upon which they might have different views and sometimes opposed views. This can only make our conversation more fruitful.

Therefore, I would like to thank all the institutions that are taking part, and all those who have sponsored this event. First and foremost, I would like to thank our American friends from the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Chicago, for making the journey to Paris in order to exchange ideas on these matters. I would also like to thank the chair of Technology, Governance and Institutional Innovations at the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs, as well as Institute Montaigne and the Cercle Montesquieu for their commitments.

Data is and will increasingly be at the heart of our everyday discussions. Data is often compared to oil, which I believe is misleading. It's true that oil become very valuable. It's true that one might talk about data pollution since we are overwhelmed by information, messages and online solicitations.

It's also true that the legal politic stakeholders exist, such as oil cartels use to share between themselves the markets a few decades ago. However, data is not a limited resource. It's non [INAUDIBLE] and non tangible. It could be mutually beneficial. This is what we should aim for.

In such a context, it's striking to see that Europeans are still looking for unicorns. Although they already play an active role in the field of data protection, and aim to address the regulatory challenges of artificial Intelligence development. While most of the major platforms come from the US, even though they begin to be slowly and increasingly challenged by Chinese companies, but do not as [INAUDIBLE] have a strong regulation in those fields.

I hope our discussions today will enlighten us about the policy making decisions that we need to undertake so we can build an inclusive digital revolution. I wish you a great conference. And I hope that at the end of the day, you will be even more convicted to act altogether in order to face this huge challenge. Have a good day.

[APPLAUSE]

NICOLAS BAUQUET: Hello, everyone. I'm Nicolas Bauquet. I'm the Research Director at Institute Montaigne. Very happy and honored to open these days. Thank you so much to a College de Bernardins to welcome us today and to be a partner of this event. It's always a pleasure to welcome friends from abroad in a place we love, in a very special place. And today, it's really one.

You have seen entering this space, these wonderful sisters in architecture. And this architecture is all about making invisible visible. And I think that's what our day is about today, making the invisible visible. Data is everywhere. Since, but they are not like printed books or big factories in the past revolutions human, human kinds have lived. They are not so visible. They are changing everything in business in the way our states are governed in our legal systems.

And all of us feel these changes, but lack the understanding and lack the feeling that they can act upon that, they can be empowered. So we need to make all these changes visible, understandable for all of us. And we need to make this journey of empowerment. And I think this is clearly linked to the crisis we are living through in many parts of the world, and especially in Paris these days.

This empowerment is a collective task. As a think tank, we are used to gather expertise from the academic, from the academics, business and public decision-makers. And that's what it is today. And we are so happy to be able with our partners to gather these different kind of expertise, these different types of point of views.

So I would like for Institute Montaigne. To thank, we are so grateful to all of those who work together to make that possible. The Coase-Sandor Institute, and thank you again. I would like also to extend my gratitude to our American guests, who traveled. Trans-Atlantic dialogue is key for us at Institute Montaigne, but I think more generally, we value very much these trans-Atlantic dialogue, especially in the field of digital issues. So it's very important for us.

Thank you also to Sciences Po, the chair Technology, Governance and Institutional Innovation. The Cercle Montesquieu, and like to thank particularly Florence G'sell, who brought us all together once again. I hope this is not the last time. We really would like to work in the long term on these issues to produce concrete results that can be a part of this empowerment process. That for us, is really key to a common future. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

FLORENCE G'SELL: Well, I would like to join my predecessor in thanking very warmly the College de Bernardins for her, its hospitality today. We organized two years ago a first conference with the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics with the support of the Cercle Montesquieu, Nicolas Guerin, Laure Lavorel.

And this first conference was interdisciplinary, but it focused mostly on legal issues. It was entitled Law and Big Data And this time, we went we wanted to focus more on economic issues. And we decided to have other partners. The Institute Montaigne, Sciences Po, for a thorough study of those very important issues. So with no further ado, I will let Omri speak for the University of Chicago.

[APPLAUSE]

OMRI BEN-SHAHAR: OK, great. Hi, everybody. Thank you for hosting us at this wonderful College de Bernardins. Thank you for the very warm greetings, and thank you to Institute Montaigne for hosting us as well and helping organize this event for a Cercle Montesquieu and the, forget, Sciences Po, for a part-, it's mind-blowing how much interest there is here in this city among the intellectual institutions, to be part of that. And it is heartwarming to be encircled with people that are interested in these topics and are willing to contribute to this dialogue.

I am primarily a lawyer. I am a law professor at the University of Chicago. And my interest is in how the law takes part in this ongoing revolution that we have in society that is driven by digital platforms and availability and the potential of big data. In a very brief two-minute introductory remark, I want to set out the scope of the issues that we are looking at, and that I hope today's discussion will help illuminate.

I see that set of issues as divided into two. One is how the law should regulate. How should we use legal rules to control the development of big data, and how institutions that are run by data? And the other way around it also goes. How data and big data changes the law? How the law is fueled, not just by the traditional way in which rules are created and enforced, but also by algorithms and other digital technologies.

On the first, how the law regulates big data, we have the biggest questions of our time. And I think there is, anyone who does not want to think about it, just buries their head in the sand. These are the great challenges of our time. We see the emergence of mega technological firms, bigger than we've seen ever before in terms of control of the market and the rapidity of their growth.

Does that problem of concentration, of competition have the, how do we address the problem of concentration when these mega monopolies happen to be also the most beloved companies in the world? In surveys, at least in the US that I'm familiar with, Amazon and Google are the most loved corporations. And they're also the biggest monopolies. How to reconcile these challenges? In the past, people didn't love monopolies, and today they do.

The second question has to do, of course, with data protection. We sometimes call it privacy, but that hides the many other issues that come up in that context. My own talk today will have to do with that. There are problems of discrimination that the law has to deal with, and problem of ownership of data. Who gets the benefit the data produces?

So these all, these are some of the big questions that the law has to deal with and it is currently transforming to deal with. And then there is the other way in which things go. How the law change, excuse me, how data changes the law and regulates the law. Can the law become personalized in the same way that insurance, medicine, education, marketing, pricing, products are? Different laws for different people? We'll have a talk about that today.

Can lawyers be changed by algorithms that will help? Clients will get predictions for the outcome of their disputes from algorithms rather than from lawyers? That would be much faster and cheaper, but will it be good to take the lawyers, at least in part, out of the game? Big data in litigation. And maybe the most mind boggling and interesting and challenging question, can judges be replaced by algorithms? Can we take away the, you know, their biases and the misjudgments and the fatigue the judges feel when they have to adjudicate disputes and their prejudices and replace them by an algorithm?

The keynote speaker today will address some of these issues. So these I see as the question that the law has to wrestle with when big data is pushing the old habits out and introducing new possibilities that are sometimes hard to resist. But dialogues like this are intended to help us figure out whether we want to just forge ahead or pause and think, maybe hold on to some of the more traditional ways in which we regulated our society.

I hope that this whets your appetite for a full day of discussion. And I again, thank our hosts here for the opportunity to engage in this dialogue. And I look very much, I look forward very much to hearing and learning today about the perspectives that the speakers will offer. Thank you.

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