Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Regulation of the digital economy is receiving increased attention both domestically and internationally, but too little scholarship exists assessing the degree to which these new rules effectively support economic, social, and sustainable development. This Article advances a micro-macro framework for assessing digital regulation and its development dimension, including digital inclusion and measures to address the digital divide, the protection of human rights, and the operationalization of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In doing so, it incorporates a “micro international law” methodology to compare domestic legal design features and trace their diffusion into regional trade agreements and, in turn, into soft law and multilateral instruments. Domestic law has been an important driver of legal change in areas like data privacy, human rights, digital infrastructure, and access to finance. In many cases, domestic law has influenced rules at a regional level, highlighting how micro approaches can flow upward to influence more macro-level rules. Trade agreements increasingly integrate new approaches in development-focused digital regulation as well, including the recent trend to include provisions on digital inclusion, such as those that appear in the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement, the New Zealand-United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement, and Digital Trade Protocol to the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement, among other instruments. Across these emerging trends, some promising variation in bottom-up legal diffusion is apparent, suggesting that legal innovations may stem from a range of national sources. However, both domestic law and trade agreements contain notable gaps in linking digital rules to social and sustainable development. These include insufficient data privacy protection, incomplete approaches to artificial intelligence, and piecemeal focus on digital infrastructure and the digital divide. Sustainability in the digital realm is an even more amorphous concept, and current national and regional rules largely overlook both environmental and social gains and losses resulting from increased digital activity. This Article explores domestic, regional, and international digital rules in the context of economic, social, and sustainable development, highlighting innovations in domestic law and trade agreements, along with alternative “micro” interventions, for future study and scaling.

Publication Citation

56 Geo. J. Int’l L. 3 (forthcoming 2025).

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