Satellite Infrastructures and Law in the Making of Planetary Knowledge

Imaginations of Planet Earth as-a-whole—that is, Earth conceived in planetary terms by wide publics—have been shaped over several decades by the growing capabilities of artificial Earth satellites to image the whole Earth, to specify all locations, and to integrate the Earth’s diverse orbital space with everyday human activities. Different Earth orbits are becoming more densely used, more securitized, more intensely managed from Earth, and more integral to activities on Earth.

This Article focuses on two categories of satellite systems that contribute directly to planetary knowledge, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Earth Observation Satellite Systems (EOSS). GNSS and EOSS have earlier military and intelligence origins, but were readily associated with 1990s-type “globalization”—the encouragement of trade and communication, and the monitoring and discouragement of illicit activities and flows. More recently both have also been integral to a process of “planetization”—the construction and wide diffusion of understandings of Earth in planetary terms, as a shared and contingent habitat with many dependencies. This Article traces the policies and conditions under which data from these satellite systems has become (for the time being) open and widely available to general publics, and the basis for “planetary” infrastructural development and dependence.

We argue that the major GNSS have all become “infrastructural”: broadcasting without charge freely available signals which enable timing, positioning, and navigation via receivers and downstream products for billions of users, as well as a fast-increasing range of important environmental uses. EOSS supply images and other data which flow into scientific models of Earth systems and many business and governmental use cases—with or without charge or restriction, depending on the provider and on government controls. EOSS have become, or are becoming, infrastructural for many forms of planetary knowledge. However, the provision of comprehensive, free-to-all, and highly reliable GNSS and EOSS data and services is not legally embedded or guaranteed, and it is far from assured. Both are “dual use” and vulnerable to kinetic or cyber disruption in conflict. GNSS are government-provided but readily spoofed or jammed, and governments are seeking to develop more resilient alternatives. EOSS are often privately owned or government-controlled, and the data or downstream products are increasingly liable to private enclosure or to government restriction on release. Questions about their assured availability and extension swirl together with renewed nationalism, military prioritization, and contestations of “planetary” politico-legal thinking and its imaginaries. It is now necessary to “think infrastructurally” about legal, policy, and economic means to ensure the reliable and universal availability, sustenance, and supplementation of these important foundations of planetary knowledge.

This paper was presented at the CJIL 2025 Symposium, Technological Innovation in Global Governance, held in January 2025, and is published in Chicago Journal of International Law, Volume 26, Issue 1 (2025).

Satellite Internet and Laser Links: Are Universal FSO Standards Needed?

Satellite Internet constellations (“SICs”) promise to connect the world, finally delivering on the promise of global connectivity. This Note explains why SICs will only achieve their maximum potential with the adoption of free space optical (“FSO”) communication technologies, which provide massive bandwidth and interference benefits over radio. FSO will yield the greatest possible benefits with standardization through a formal standard development organization. Standardized, with the ability to communicate, collaborate, and consolidate, SICs will provide the greatest coverage and fastest speeds to their consumers. While SIC consolidation will proffer many benefits, it will also bear risks, as large players exert outsized market influence and reduce innovation. Geopolitical competition will make universal standards unlikely, necessitating national and international collaboration.

This paper originated in the 2023 IILJ Space and Planetary Colloquium. It was published in the NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, Volume 26, Issue 4.

Multilateral Development Banks and the Legal Fabric of Global Data and AI Governance

As countries around the world engage in a “race to AI regulation” to increase trust and uptake of AI systems, little attention has been paid to the role of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in shaping AI governance in the Global South. This article aims to address this gap in the literature by exploring how MDBs construct an intricate, dense “legal fabric” comprised of a range of binding and nonbinding instruments that act at international, regional, and project-specic sites. MDBs provide funding, technical assistance, and drafting advice for the creation of national laws, policies, and regulatory frameworks–but they also exert leverage through a range of other legal, bureaucratic, and organizational instruments, including loan agreements, project appraisal documents, operational manuals, impact and risk assessment frameworks, terms of reference, guiding principles for infrastructure design, and playbooks for policymakers. These documents shape, reinforce, embed, and stabilize norms with direct impacts on AI systems, and are deeply entangled with law and legal concepts from a variety of doctrines, particularly data protection, algorithmic governance, and cybercrime. “Untangling” this legal fabric reveals several difcult normative, political, and distributive questions regarding both the procedural means through which MDBs shape and enact these instruments, and the substantive norms that are “baked” into this legal fabric and the digital infrastructures they encase. This article concludes by arguing that MDBs must ensure that their work on AI regulation reduces digital inequality, reects the needs and values of the communities they operate in (rather than a top-down, Global North-driven approach), and incorporates active participation from various “publics” that may be directly and indirectly impacted by these systems.

Do as I Say, Not as I Code: GitHub's Copilot Prompts IP Litigation with International Implications

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in con-temporary technological ecosystems has sparked significant legal debates, particularly regarding intellectual property (IP) rights. One particularly notable yet under-reported case is Doe v. GitHub, currently stayed in the Northern District of California after the court certified an order for interlocutory appeal on September 27, 2024. This lawsuit involves OpenAI, GitHub, and its parent company Microsoft, focusing on the use of open-source software (OSS) code to train LLMs, specifically GitHub’s Copilot—a programming assistance tool currently powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and previously by Codex, a modified, fine-tuned version of GPT-3 additionally trained on gigabytes of publicly available source code. Although praised for its potential to enhance programming productivity, open-source developers and communities have raised concerns about Copilot due to its tendency to reproduce material from public repositories without properly attributing authorship or adhering to terms and conditions of the original open-source licenses. The upcoming decision by the Ninth Circuit on whether claims under DMCA § 1202(b)(1) or (b)(3) must meet an “identicality” requirement carries significant implications for the AI industry, particularly in shaping standards for copyright compliance in models that use open-source data.

Digitalization as Development: Rethinking the IFC’s Risk Assessment and Remedy Frameworks in the Context of Digital Technologies

“Digital transformation” has become an increasingly central pillar of the international development landscape. “Reaping the benefits of digitalization” is seen as a developmental imperative, and new technologies are widely hailed to provide transformative opportunities. For multilateral development banks (MDBs) in particular, digitalization has become a strategic priority, and these institutions are financing a rapidly growing number of projects with digital components. Although digital technologies can be transformative, whether and under what conditions such transformations enhance economic and social well-being in the ways that MDBs proclaim requires close examination.

Focusing on the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a private-sector lending institution of the World Bank Group, this report unpacks the concept of “digital transformation,” posing the question: what exactly is being transformed by digital technologies, for whom, and with what implications? The report then analyzes the IFC’s current framework for assessing the risks and impacts of its investments and for remedying harms arising from its projects and identifies key challenges that digitalization poses to existing risk and impact assessment frameworks and remedy mechanisms. It then proposes forward-looking suggestions for how existing frameworks might be rethought and reformed.

Curb Your Enthusiam: Why Europe's Digital Reforms May Not Become a Global Standard

The European Union is widely perceived and presents itself as the global vanguard in the struggle to regulate digital corporations. The Union’s regulatory schemes, especially the Digital Services Act, are widely hailed as the continent’s – and from the EU’s perspective, the world’s – best shot at taming digital capitalism. The EU designed many of those measures to become a ‘global standard’. Yet, drawing from organization theory and a legal realist analysis of several of the key provisions of the DSA and their potential implementation, I claim that crucial parts of Europe’s reforms will not become a global normative standard – or, if they do, in ways fundamentally different to what many would expect. That is for two reasons. First, while the DSA does establish a few concise and objective substantive standards, it also grants extensive discretion to private organizations. Second, if private actors will, as we must assume, exercise this discretion in an autonomous (some might say self-serving manner), many publicly acclaimed provisions of Europe’s digital governance reforms may yield globalized private ordering carrying the legitimizing label of EU supervision. Consequently, some current European reforms may stabilize rather than constrain private power and diffuse, if at all, only European ceremonies and labels but not necessarily the full substance of EU law.

From In(-)formation to Infrastructural Turns: The Digital Futures of Human Rights Law and Practice

In his book, The Informational Logic of Human Rights: Network Imaginaries in the Cybernetic Age, Joshua Bowsher critiques the human rights movement’s preoccupation with informational practices. Tracing the evolution of informational preoccupation of human rights organizations to the rise of cybernetics and its enmeshment with the neoliberal project, Bowsher argues that the resulting practice of creating violations as events through capturing, cutting and noise elimination has defanged and depoliticized rights. The quest for objective, stable and predictable knowledge has permeated even the turn to algorithms and machine learning. While denouncing the human rights movement’s resistance to critical and political forms of knowledge making that interrogate subjects, norms, values and power relations, Bowsher nonetheless sees potential for salvaging the promise of human rights. What is needed, Bowsher argues, is a reconfguration of human rights information from an assemblage of ‘brute facts’ into positional, situated knowledge-making practice that would aim to forge connections between structures of oppression and domination and sufferings of ‘particularly situated human beings’. Picking up on Bowsher’s call for human rights in(-)formation, this review essay examines the infrastructural turn needed to effectuate knowledge-generating practices attuned to the polyvalency of the situated perspectives. Focusing particularly on the growing role of digital data and infrastructures, the essay seeks to illuminate promising paths forward for human rights advocates and practitioners.

Sensoring the Oceans: The Argo Floats Array in the Governance of Science Data Infrastructures

What role do governance arrangements, background legal rules, and the core infrastructures play in enabling data collection, determining what “ocean data” is produced, and when and how it is made available? We explore this question by focusing on data about oceanic features produced by Argo – an international program, operationalized by state agencies and research institutions, that comprises arrays of autonomous floats for ocean observation. Through examination of annual meeting notes, interviews, and observation of the Argo Steering Committee’s annual meeting, we analyze the techniques and practices involved in planning, testing, calibrating, validating, and error-correcting that ultimately lead to the production, transmission, and dissemination of Argo data. We then position Argo within the institutional governance of oceans, weather, climate and, most recently, earth systems to illustrate both the evolution of Argo’s role and its evolving and uneasy position within different governance approaches. In the conclusion, we challenge the utility of “ocean data” as an analytical category and highlight the risks of over-coordination and institutionalization of data infrastructures. We suggest that allowing data infrastructures like Argo to develop organically might lead to productive (if unexpected) connections, fusions, or splits, which might in turn reorient the focus of observation towards unexplored interactions between and within earth systems. We hope that our analysis helps bring to the fore some core data-infrastructural features of planetary governance as it now exists and will (have to) rapidly further evolve.

The final version of this working paper will be published in “Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule” (Cambridge University Press), edited by Fleur Johns, Gavin Sullivan, and Dimitri van Den Meerssche.

Datafication, Power, and Publics in India's National Digital Health Ecosystem

While evident for a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated the need to strengthen India’s public healthcare system. But since 2017, the solution to India’s public health woes takes the shape of the National Digital Health Ecosystem (NDHE) – a digital system for the generation, use, and ‘frictionless’ circulation of health data across healthcare actors through the use of artefacts such as health IDs, electronic health records, data standards, and federated computing architectures. These artefacts are not neutral technological systems. Rather, together with social practices, they constitute a “data infrastructure”. Seeing the NDHE as a data infrastructure allows us to visibilise the regulatory effects of the NDHE, i.e., the ways in which the NDHE creates “communities of the affected” whose access to public health is now mediated by affordances granted by the NDHE. This, in turn, shapes law and regulation of the NDHE, where legal frameworks for (health) data protection are not weakened by accident, but weakened by design. At the same time, the regulatory effects of the NDHE can and should be regulated by law, by channeling law’s commitment to the creation of healthy public spheres to ensure the vitality of a democracy. Accordingly, this paper makes three contributions – one, it provides a brief overview of the political economy and the regulatory effects of the NDHE; two, it analyses the ways in which the regulatory effects of the NDHE shape legal frameworks for health data to disempower individuals and communities who are the generators of this data; and three, it outlines research and policy suggestions for how the law can intervene in limiting the exclusionary data-politics of the NDHE.

This paper originated in the seminar Global Data Law II: Ordering and Power. It will be published by the National Law School of India University’s Socio-Legal Review, Vol 20, Issue 1 (2024).

Zoning Data Flows

This article explores how China is developing a unique location-based data outbound deregulation regime to mitigate the negative effects of its initial security-driven regulations. A major move is repurposing free trade zones with data outbound negative lists. Using an infrastructural-thinking framework, this article examines the evolution of data outbound regulation in China, recent initiatives in the country's free trade zones, and the dynamics between local and central governments. China's data outbound practices are enabled and constrained by its global information and telecommunication (ICT) infrastructural connectivity and domestic distribution. Free trade zones become appealing deregulation testing grounds due to their overlap with critical ICT hub locations and their role as sites for policy experimentation. The ongoing pilot projects, through the interplay of law and infrastructure, present promising potential to channel China's data outbound activities into specific areas, thereby increasing their visibility, making them more amenable to regulation, and fostering both local and national economies.

Published in Tsinghua China Law Review Vol. 16 No. 2 (2024), pp. 191-223. This paper draws insights from Guarini Global Law & Tech’s Global Data Law Project and Institute for International Law and Justice’s Infrastructure as Regulation Project.