# Platform Economy and Techno-Regulation--Experimenting with Reputation and Nudge
## 2 Origins and Perspectives of Techno-Regulation  
In the introduction, we touched on the difficulties that traditional legal remedies come across when attempting to uphold the law in digital environments--the need for technological support for legal safeguards is growing. On closer inspection, human artifacts have always contributed to shaping the law in terms of content, complexity and ways to protect rights. The \"_offendicula_\" known since ancient Roman law--gates and shards of glass put on the edge of boundary walls--are an _ante-litteram_ example of this--a way to protect rights relating to physical goods (an orchard, a house) from threats taking place in the physical world, using physical artifacts. In the information society, where the goods to be protected are often intangible just like the threats against them, technology retains its role. Contexts that could be cited in this regard are manifold, just think about the use scenarios of robots and drones. A special place should anyway be acknowledged for the Internet, a universe that is deeply connected with the idea of algorithmic governance. It is no accident that the theoretical reflection on techno-regulation went along with the rise and evolution of the World Wide Web. An indirect confirmation of this relation can be found by analyzing the number of scientific publications dealing with techno-regulation over the years. The trend shows how the development of interest in the regulatory use of technology coincides with the emergence of Web 2.0 (see Figure 1). The Internet is not only the place where the normative role of code has been identified and discussed for the first time but it has also provided legal scholars with cues about the possibility of purposely using the code, computational tools and web technologies to implement legal safeguards. In this respect, it makes sense to cast a glance at the contributions coming from those legal scholars that have so far paid more attention to the impact of information technologies on the law and its phenomenology. A cursory review can turn useful to better understand the evolution that led to the emergence of current vision of techno-regulation. The debate started with a group of scholars that first realized how, throughout the internet, technology plays a regulatory role. Back in 1997, [PERSON] [6], director of the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy, highlighted how technical standards and design choices on the web actually impose rules, just like legal rule-making does. Policies--in the narrow sense of protocols but also policies in the broadest sense--are embedded into the design of technological systems, similar to what happens in \"privacy by design\" [7]. This vision is taken to the extreme by [PERSON] [8], from Stanford Center for Internet Society, with his claim that in cyberspace \"code is law.\"  
Over the years, the way of looking at the potential intersection between law and technology has turned into the idea of exploiting technology to regulate economic and social relationships both online and offline. The philosopher of law, [PERSON], was one of the earliest to explicitly state that technological infrastructures supporting our transactions and interactions are set _\"to join law, morals and religion\"_ as _\"one of the main instruments of social control and order\"_[9]. A bolder consideration is that of [PERSON] when claiming that, in some ways, technical rules can be even more effective than traditional legal norms [10]. While the latter merely stipulates what people shall or shall not do, the former determine what people can or cannot do in the first place [10]. According to [PERSON], this actually _\"eliminates the need for any third party enforcement authority to intervene after the fact, in order to punish those who infringed the law.\"_  
The transition we are talking about is somehow accomplished with the concept of \"code-driven law\" recently sketched to identify \"self-executing\" statutes and contracts directly written into computer code.