Theorizing Regulation Through Code: A Recursive Regulatory Model for Technology.

This paper presents a model for understanding how technology regulates. The notion that technology serves as a form of regulation is widely recognized in the scholarship on information technologies (Lessig 1999). For example, information technologies affect societal concerns such as accessibility, privacy, and security in online environments. While scholars have recognized that technology regulates, the theoretical understanding of technology as a form of regulation is immature. In this paper, we present a model, the Recursive Regulatory Model for Technology (RRMT) that seeks to understand how technology regulates. This model is largely based upon Giddens structuration theory with some insights from Actor-Network Theory. It theorizes how technology develops, evolves, and acts as a regulatory mechanism. Our model contains three elements — institutional settings, humans, and technology, which are related recursively. Part of the model considers the recursive relationship between individuals and institutional settings, which is widely recognized in the literature on organizational behavior. The second part of the model is more novel, and focuses on the recursive relationship between humans and technology. Aspects of this relationship include how technologies are inscribed with norms and values, that users have a degree of agency in using technologies, and how technologies can be reconfigured and modified. To support this thesis, we synthesize the existing literature within communications, law, and science and technology studies. Finally, we highlight the usefulness of this model by employing it to study the evolution of cookies technology. The cookies technology allows web sites to maintain information on their users, and therefore, has implications for privacy. Its development was shaped by a number of institutions, including universities, firms, and consortia. The recursive nature of how cookies regulates is evident in how the cookies technology changed over time to include features that allowed users to better manage the cookies technology. These changes only came about after individuals both collectively, through government and public interest groups, as well as individually pressured Netscape to reconfigure the cookies technology. Our paper analyzes this process using the RRMT and shows how RRMT allows us to better understand how the cookies technology affected, i.e., regulated, individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]