IViR is pleased and proud to announce that Balázs Bodó has been appointed, per 1 January 2025, as a full professor at IViR, to the chair ‘Information Law and Policy, with special emphasis on Technology Governance’.
The complex nature and architecture of digital information and communication technologies, and their uncertain societal, economic, cultural and political impact requires both an interdisciplinary approach to researching their role in society, and a comprehensive view on regulation, based on the view that law is part of a complex technology governance toolset. The new chair acknowledges and responds to these developments in the domain of information law, and its subject matter.
First, the Chair incorporates the need for an interdisciplinary approach to legal research. In close collaboration with colleagues at IViR, and at the Amsterdam Law School, Balázs will work towards a technology-agnostic approach to technology governance, integrating research from various technological domains and different governance approaches. He will devote attention to the fact that the current technology governance approaches are fragmented across different disciplinary silos (law, economics, social sciences) and particular technologies (AI, infrastructures, platforms, etc.), and responds to this challenge by taking a law+ approach to technology governance. This approach can contribute to the long-term development of the discipline of information law, as the analytical and action framework for the information society, which takes account of the needs and interests of citizens, consumers, industries, public institutions, civil society organizations and other stakeholders.
Second, products and services that are enabled by modern communication technologies, such as platforms, decentralized p2p networks, e-commerce marketplaces, mobile applications, artificial intelligence systems, are complex socio-technological assemblages. They incorporate physical components, software, the businesses or public institutions which develop and operate them. They are also the data and information they use as input, and which they produce, as well as various stakeholders who are using these services, from individuals to advertisers and institutions. These different technologies necessitate radically different approaches to their governance. The emerging European tech regulation frameworks seem to provide an overarching and stable framework of governance, yet, even with those in place, law in general and information law in particular still faces several challenges, such as the uncertainty around the tools and methods that could inform law on the current facts on the ground, and on future trends, dynamics, risks; or the questions about the responses, pushback, avoidance, and resistance to the new regulatory instruments and institutions. Zooming out even more, we need to ask what power dynamics are at play when it comes to technology regulation and policy. And of course, the perennial question: what happens when the power of law is on a collision course with the power of technology?
These “meta-legal” questions, pointing beyond a purely doctrinal approach to information law, technology regulation, and the protection of fundamental rights set the contours of the Chair, offering of a systemic, comprehensive approach towards law in general, and information law in particular, providing the indispensable social, economic, political, institutional, cultural contexts in which law must operate, and regulation must achieve its goals.
Balázs arrived at IViR in January 2013, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, after spending several months at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society as a Fulbright Research Fellow. Balázs has a Masters degree in Economics from Corvinus University in Budapest, and wrote his PhD in Media Studies on the history and economic impact of copyright piracy (summa cum laude, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest). He has been the founding member, and later, an assistant professor of the Media Research and Education Center at the Sociology Department of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. At IViR, he worked on a wide range of socio-legal research projects. He conducted empirical research on alternative copyright compensation systems with Bernt Hugenholtz and Joao Pedro Quintais, built data donation infrastructures as part of Natali Helberger’s Personalized News ERC project, and founded the Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab as part of his own ERC starting grant.
Currently Balázs is the program director of the Law School’s brand new Advanced Master of Laws in Technology Governance program, and leads a university-wide interdisciplinary research priority area on Trust in the Digital Society.
The new Chair is a foundational building block of IViR’s broader mission, which is anchored in the imperative to study information law in its broader context, thus extending well beyond studying doctrinal questions of information law.