The Many Shades of Clouds
How Law Fails (Us) in Seeing Power in the Digital Economy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12899487 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Petros Terzis (0000-0001-8985-5651, corresponding author), Anushka Mittal, Joris Van Hoboken |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Regulation & Governance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1748-5983 • E-ISSN: 1748-5991 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/rego.70149 |
| OpenAlex | W7140225337 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 135 |
Cloud infrastructures form the backbone of our contemporary (digital) production environment. Despite their centrality, legal and scholarly practice have not been treating cloud infrastructures as single objects of/for study. In other words, we have laws for regulating services and products that flow from (within) cloud infrastructures, but we have yet to grapple with their operators' ability to: (1) render things administratively calculable and legible; and (2) to dictate the global tempo of innovation by orchestrating technological trajectories. This is a problem and a consequence of a fragmented legal epistemology that has been constantly searching for gaps to fill in what has been perceived as a linear continuum of legal and technological development. Alas, this paper argues that we (legal scholars and practitioners) have been looking too closely to these developments to be able to see them. In this direction, the paper explains what we have missed in the (non‐)regulation of cloud infrastructures, why, and what we can do to start seeing, learning, and talking about them in a way that better reflects their nature and power in modern economies and societies. And, at a time when various jurisdictions around the world are fragmenting the world of cloud infrastructures into lands of “sovereignty” ordered and monitored by multinational corporations, we find this legal and policy endeavor to be as necessary as ever
Cloud computing · Digital economy · Jurisprudence · Multinational corporation · Power (physics · Production (economics · Copyright and Intellectual Property · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Energy Law and Policy
Regulating the Cloud
Between Truth and Power
Access Controlled
The Brussels Effect
The Critical Legal Studies Movement
Accountability in a computerized society
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
Digital sovereignty
The European approach to regulating AI through technical standards
Intellectual monopoly in global value chains
Cloud Computing Law
Industry Unbound
A World of Struggle
Splintering, Specificity, Unsettlement
Agents of Change
The Laws of Technology and the Technology of Law
Whither the Public Internet
What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital
Mediated trust
The production of prediction
Platform power and regulatory politics
Varieties of corporate innovation systems and their interplay with global and national systems
Power, Knowledge and Technology in a Finite World
Cloud capitalism and the rise of scalable digital assets
Numbers will not save us
European cloud computing policy
Constitutionalizing the Economy
Trustworthy artificial intelligence and the European Union AI act
Brandeis in Brussels ? Bureaucratic discretion, social learning, and the development of regulated competition in the European Union
On the Democratic Role of News Recommenders
Certification systems for machine learning
Caught Between Privacy and Surveillance
European artificial intelligence “trusted throughout the world
Private authority and public policy interactions in global context
Algorithmic governance
Revisiting the governance of privacy
Big tech, knowledge predation and the implications for development
Ways of constructing research questions
Corporate Capitalism and the Growing Power of Big Data
Big AI
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |