Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 9th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, a conversation with Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

In her book Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, Anu Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches governing the digital economy—the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model—and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Each digital empire is advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.

About the Speaker

A leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and a sought-after commentator on the European Union, global economy, and digital regulation, Anu Bradford coined the term the Brussels Effect to describe the European Union’s outsize influence on global markets. She is the author of The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her newest book, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2023, and was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by Financial Times.

Bradford is also an expert in international antitrust law. She spearheads the Comparative Competition Law Project, which has built a comprehensive global data set of antitrust laws and enforcement across time and jurisdictions. The project, a joint effort between the Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, covers more than a century of regulation in over 100 countries and has been the basis for Bradford’s recent empirical research on the antitrust regimes used to regulate markets. 

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2012, Bradford was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also practiced EU and antitrust law in Brussels and has served as an adviser on economic policy in the Parliament of Finland and as an expert assistant at the European Parliament. The World Economic Forum named her Young Global Leader ’10. 

At the Law School, Bradford is the director of the European Legal Studies Center, which trains students for leadership roles in European law, public affairs, and the global economy. She is also a senior scholar at Columbia Business School’s Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business, and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.