Governance by Emulation: What Big Tech Gets Wrong about Law, and What Law Gets Right About Big Tech

Abstract:

Facebook built a "Supreme Court." Anthropic wrote a "constitution." Across the industry, the executives who run the infrastructures modern life depends on—platforms, cloud, AI, even satellites—keep reaching for the vocabulary of public law to govern themselves. It's an odd instinct: private companies borrowing the language of states.

Is it real reform, or just a good-looking fig leaf?

Drawing on his award-winning research and a new book from Cambridge University Press, Dr. Moritz Schramm (NYU) argues that this pattern, which he calls Governance by Emulation, reveals something worrying: we are out of ideas. Regulators and companies alike reach backward for courts, constitutions, and checks and balances because no one has articulated what governing an infrastructure company for the 21st century should actually look like. The result is a hybrid world where the language of legitimacy is borrowed freely, but the substance is optional.

The talk draws particular lessons from the EU's turn toward codified digital oversight and the American reliance on corporate self-regulation—two paths that expose what we can, and cannot, salvage from these old institutional templates, and what genuinely new thinking about accountability owes to a moment when a handful of companies effectively govern the globe.

Bio:

Dr. Moritz Schramm is an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, a Research Scholar at NYU's Institute for International Law and Justice and a Faculty Fellow at NYU's Information Law Institute. He is the author of the book Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability (Cambridge University Press 2026). He received numerous awards for his work.