Regulating digital constellations often comes with much normative fanfare but little technical and infrastructural realism. What sounds nice on paper often proves extremely difficult to implement in existing technological and infrastructural set ups. Can data verifiably be ‘localized’? Can large language models ‘understand’ ethics? Many prominent policy proposals hardly withstand scrutiny from an infrastructural perspective. In turn, how does existing digital infrastructure impact regulatory path-dependencies? And, crucially, can we conceptualize (control over) infrastructure itself as a form of regulation of human behavior?

These and more questions are at the center of the guest lecture by Professor Thomas Streinz of the European University Institute.