In 2024, we will see courts and regulators around the world demonstrate that technological exceptionalism, when it comes to the applicability of legal rules, is magical thinking. The situation has already started to change based on the assumption that laws and regulations cannot keep pace with technological innovation. But a sea change will come in 2024: not through new rules, but through the aggressive application of old rules to new problems.
In the United States, in the absence of federal privacy legislation, regulators have already begun repurposing the laws and rules they have available to address some of the most egregious examples of Big Tech playing loose with our rights and data personal. In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory burden of consumer protection regulations.
It addressed the issue of dark patterns, or deceptive designs used by apps and websites to trick users into doing something they didn’t intend to do, such as buying or subscribing to something, with a fine of half a billion dollars. Fortnite producer of Epic Games. The FTC also issued large fines to Amazon for significant privacy violations through its Alexa and Ring Doorbell devices. There are no signs that, come 2024, the FTC will slow down, with rules in the works to regulate commercial surveillance and digital security. In 2024, we will see regulators in other fields and other parts of the world follow suit, buoyed by the FTC’s successes.
In 2022, the French data protection authority, the CNIL, fined Clearview AI a record 20 million euros (about $21.9 million) for failing to comply with an earlier 2021 ruling, which had ordered the company to stop collecting and using data from people in France. territory. Further late fines will accrue into millions of euros in 2023. In 2024 we will see regulators such as the CNIL take more radical legal measures to demonstrate that no company is above the law.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman began 2023 with a call for global regulation of AI, but balked at the actual prospect of EU regulation in the form of the EU AI Act. While intelligence condemners artificial technology were calling for a pause on innovation to allow regulation to catch up, regulators, including Italy’s DPA, found a way to clip their wings by blocking ChatGPT on their territory, albeit temporarily, with regulations existing. Ongoing intellectual property lawsuits, such as the one against Microsoft that accuses the company of illegally using code created by others, could lead to a turbulent 2024 for the foundational business model of generative artificial intelligence.
It’s not just the individual impact of technology that courts and regulators have in their sights. In 2024 they will also take into consideration the impacts on society, markets and businesses. For example, antitrust actions in the US and EU launched in 2023 challenge Google’s dominance of the advertising technology market, potentially shaking up the monolithic logic of the programmatic advertising model that helped create the internet as we know it today.
In 2024 we will see the end of the regulatory vacuum that Big Tech has long enjoyed. As new laws and regulations such as the AI Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act in the EU begin to take shape, courts and regulators will continue to apply existing laws and regulations to the new ways in which technology influences our daily lives. We will see the full range of legal tools arrive to address the challenges. Human rights and civil liberties law, competition law, consumer rights law, intellectual property, defamation, tort, employment law and a host of other fields will be engaged to address harms in life real already caused by existing technology, including artificial intelligence.