Competition under network effects takes on interesting dynamics for which any digital innovator will need to plan. If there is more than one competing network battling to reach critical mass, the marketplace can be even more volatile and the outcome very unpredictable. If network effects are strong and users care relatively more about the connections than about the inherent features of the product, the market may “tip” and feature “winner take all” dynamics. This chapter explores strategies that facilitate competition against other networks.

In recent decades, a number of jurisdictions have moved towards more open practices in donor conception, including legislating for the rights of donor-conceived people to trace their donor. In such contexts, the donor’s role is ambivalent. They are not expected to enact a parental role in relation to people conceived from their donation. However, they are expected to ‘be available’ for some form of relationship. Our UK-based research found that donors typically navigate these dual obligations by articulating a moral commitment to ‘following the lead’ of the families they help to create and particularly the people conceived from their donation. In this chapter, we illustrate how sperm and egg donors imagine and enact this commitment but also show that it is easier to say than to do. The embedded nature of donors’ personal lives and relationships create challenges in letting others decide their role in relation to recipient families.

Can creativity make you feel connected to other people? Terror management theory, which addresses the existential dread associated with death, suggests that the answer is no. But I push back against this view and highlight an array of studies and theories that point to many ways in which creativity can bring us together. First I discuss the museum effect, which indicates that experiencing the arts makes us feel connected to other people and the world. Next I discuss creativity’s association with friendships, positive working relationships, and even romance. Finally I explore a cluster of traits associated with creativity, including openness, perspective taking, and cognitive flexibility, which are also related to reduced prejudice and stereotyping. Nurturing creativity may be a way to increase equity.

In Chapter 4, we continue our explanation of tradeoffs between expenditure categories by focusing on how domestic and international contextual factors can constrain or facilitate government budgetary behavior. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. For each of these contextual factors, we develop a set of expectations about the spending tradeoffs between policy areas if left and right governments remain ideologically consistent to their preferences versus if context overwhelms those ideological concerns. Our results and conclusions are mixed across the domestic contexts. We find almost no tradeoffs and none that are consistent with either type of expectations for election timing. For an increasing unemployment, we find a mixture of ideological and strategic tradeoff decisions, while, for positive economic growth, we find substantial evidence that governments take advantage of the circumstances to go beyond their ideological priorities. Results for international contexts are also mixed with government spending allocations lacking ideological differences in the face of increased globalization. But, for increased conflict, right and left governments reallocate expenditures in similar ways – highlighting how contexts can overwhelm governments.

Whether domestic and international contexts affect governments’ abilities to alter total expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility is our focus in Chapter 6. We develop expectations about the influence of government ideology and majority status together with contextual factors and other budgetary components on each of our four budgetary components. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. Building on the results from the panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model from Chapter 5, we specify separate reduced-form models for each of our budget component variables to test our theoretical expectations. Across the results we present in this chapter, we find very few statistically significant effects, especially in terms of long-run effects, on the four budgetary components. The strongest results are for the influence of contextual factors on budgetary volatility, specifically when increasing unemployment and economic openness. When unemployment or economic openness increases, we find that budgetary volatility increases under majority left governments in both the short- and long-runs. This evidence indicates that right and left governments differ in how much they respond to both domestic and international contexts.

This chapter, while acknowledging that there are certain differences and similarities in how the law treats standards development organizations (SDOs) that develop voluntary standards, offers a holistic analysis of the procedural principles introduced in the WTO, EU, and US regulatory frameworks, namely, transparency, openness/participation, consensus, impartiality, balance, effectiveness, relevance, coherence, coordination, concerns of developing countries, appeal, and access to standards, which this study collectively refers to as “due process” principles. This chapter further explores the relevance and suitability of these principles to the different types of standards bodies and identifies the shortcomings of each of the legal mechanisms with regard to ICT standardization. It concludes that these principles are formulated rather flexible and, to be effective, need further concretization by SDOs.

This chapter analyses the extent to which the legal instruments discussed in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 apply to the examined SDOs. It also evaluates these organizations’ rules and procedures against the due process requirements of the applicable regulatory frameworks discussed in Chapter 6. While acknowledging the heterogeneity of the organizations’ operational frameworks, this chapter also emphasizes that their organizational rules – while designed in self-regulatory processes – should yet be considered within the legal constraints of the applicable regulatory frameworks. Indeed, SDOs enjoy a wide discretion not only to implement the due process requirements, but also to determine what these requirements mean, defining such terms as “consensus,” “openness,” and “balance” in their procedural rules. While observing that there are different ways to implement due process principles into the organizations’ procedures, this chapter notes that the level of procedural guarantees offered during the different stages of decision-making differs per organization, but is often insufficient from the perspective of legitimacy.

The fourth chapter deals with the ECJ’s present role in the EU’s political system and how its procedural and organisational law might need to be adapted to better reflect it. The chapter first explains how in recent years, notably through the Treaty of Lisbon, the ECJ’s mandate has been modified. It argues that the Court is no longer only concerned with ensuring the autonomy and effectiveness of EU law, but that it is also a democratic organ of the EU polity, whose decisions need to be responsive to EU citizens. To ensure democratic responsiveness, the chapter argues, the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law needs to be further developed. The chapter makes concrete proposals by applying the Treaty on European Union’s democratic principles to the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law. It discusses, among other things, the role of the European Parliament in selecting ECJ members the place of NGOs and civil society in ECJ proceedings, the interaction between the Advocate General and the judges, the composition of the ECJ’s chambers and the mechanism for case assignment and make suggestions how to better reflect the concern for the ECJ’s democratic responsiveness.

Worries about the death of democracy are as old as democracy itself. According to a common view of democracy, democracies come to an end when their institutions and laws break down and are replaced by undemocratic ones. I contrast this common picture of democracy with one that depicts democracy as a way of living together, as a form of action that is, in principle, ongoing. On this second picture, democracy need not die even if its institutions do, because the civic actions that make a society democratic are a form of activity that doesn’t end.

Part II assesses the new economic governance of the Eurozone in light of the “rule of law” framework. Chapter 3 appraises this framework in light of the principle of conferral and the competence allocation system set up by the Treaties. It finds that the Treaties are marked by deep conceptual ambiguity as to the reach of the notion of economic policy and as to the meaning of the concept of policy coordination. It shows how this ambiguity, in-built flexibility and dynamism was fully taken advantage of by the Union in the context of the Eurocrisis and COVID-19 crisis to substantially transform and upgrade EU economic governance. It finds that the reform process flirted with the limits of what was constitutionally feasible but never facially violated the scope of the Treaties’ enabling clauses for economic policy. The advent of a new system of EU economic governance in the postcrisis era is not irreconcilable with the competence allocation system of the Union but materializes the Treaties’ spirit of purposive openness and contextual adaptability. As the EU legislator seems to have reached, with NGEU, the outer edge of what is constitutionally feasible, any further consolidation of the economic pillar would require Treaty revision.

Creativity, an apex of consciousness, contains the altered states of a creative trance that are treasured across cultures and time. Ranging from the creativity of everyday life to the reveries that inspire works of science and art to the fast-moving action of sports that shape and reshape personal goals, the creative trance can also be a transcendent experience, an ecstasy using the body’s own pharmacology. There are multiple depths of a creative trance, from light enjoyable flow states to deep experiences obliterating all external stimuli. The degree of depth can correlate with the psychological capacity for absorption. The creative trance relates to the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Openness, Big-C and little-c creativity, Wallas’ four-stage creative process, and Barron’s concept of a habitually creative person. The creative trance can be a pivot to personal transformation, creating new work and a new view of the world, and may also bring the capacity for transcendence.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000, which came into force in 2005, provides, for the first time, a legally enforceable right of access to official information. This chapter examines the benefits of freedom of information and the scheme and scope of the Freedom of Information Act, examining how it balances the competing interests in the disclosure and retention of official information. The enforcement mechanisms in the Act are outlined and the ministerial veto power discussed. The chapter concludes by examining the effectiveness of the openness regime imposed by the Freedom of Information Act.