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Internet of Things: Governance and Metagovernance of Networking Everything

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The Internet of Things Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Abstract

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), of various smart objects and services, of smart cities, presents commercial, governance and metagovernance challenges. The effects on business challenge traditional governance, by increasing the value of data, something poorly captured in competition law and sectoral regulation. A central challenge is ensuring at least the present levels of privacy, requiring extensions of data protection laws and institutions, and training of engineers and entrepreneurs in well-established principles, notably privacy by design. It requires modifications and extension of competition law to protect consumers and the addition of the collection and processing of data into merger control and abuse of dominance proceedings. Metagovernance encompasses the design of the systems, of the various agencies, laws, appeals and oversight, accountability and transparency.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A unicorn is a startup company with a value of over USD 1 billion.

  2. 2.

    The EU-US privacy shield, supposedly allowing data transfers, has proved highly controversial.

  3. 3.

    See, for example, special issue of IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 5(3).

  4. 4.

    The term jailbreaking is used to describe overriding requirements to use proprietary refills.

  5. 5.

    This company recently failed.

  6. 6.

    The same issue arose in the 1950s over the requirement by IBM that customers use only their punched cards with their mainframe computers.

  7. 7.

    Similar problems can arise in bankruptcy, with the possible disposal of large data sets, where contracted conditions for the use of data may be lost or the purchaser may wish them lost.

  8. 8.

    To complicate matters ages of legal consent vary considerably between jurisdictions.

  9. 9.

    It is unlikely that acceptance of T&Cs in an unfamiliar language would be enforceable in court.

  10. 10.

    https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht=LG%20K%F6ln&Datum=28.07.2017&Aktenzeichen=118%20KLs%204%2F17.

  11. 11.

    These are blogged mercilessly by https://twitter.com/internetofshit.

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  1. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Ewan Sutherland

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  1. Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    James A. Cunningham

  2. Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Jason Whalley

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Sutherland, E. (2020). Internet of Things: Governance and Metagovernance of Networking Everything. In: Cunningham, J., Whalley, J. (eds) The Internet of Things Entrepreneurial Ecosystems. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47364-8_6

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