299Private International Law and the Internet

Prof. Dan Svantesson

Faculty of Law, Bond University, Australia

This short article is based on the presentation I had the pleasure of offering at the Lex&Forum webinar on “The Internet and other emerging technologies within the EU and International legal order”, held on the 13th of May 2022. Over the years, and due to the difference in time zone between Australia and e.g., Europe and the US, I have become very selective as regards the speaking opportunities that I accept. But when I was approached by the team of Lex&Forum, by Dr. Ioannis Revolidis more specifically whose scholarship I admire, I immediately accepted the invitation, on account of the work that they are delivering in the area of private international law. Another motivator was, of course, the excellent line-up of the speakers. While it would be unfair to single out anybody because, really, all the speakers are of extraordinarily high calibre, I would like, nonetheless, to mention that I am very happy to have been part of the panel so competently chaired by Prof. Symeon Symeonides –a true leader in the field, whose work I have admired since I started working in the area of private international law.

I have structured this article in the same manner in which I structured the mentioned presentation; that is, it is structured around six different problems. Problems that I see as central in today’s application of private international law to the online environment. That might seem like a somewhat negative point of view. But, as lawyers, we are always used to working with problems, so I think we can approach the topic this way. However, first, to prepare the ground for the discussion of those six key problems, I first want to say a few words about what we may view as uncontroversial when it comes to private international law and the Internet.

The uncontroversial

When I started working on the latest edition of my book on Private International Law and the Internet[1], I wanted to explore, of course, the crossover between the two. One key ambition was to map out what fundamental ideas or concepts or fundamental truths are there that we all can agree upon. I had the ambition of 300putting together a long list of such fundamental ideas or concepts or fundamental truths, which could then function as a starting point for further discussion. In the end, with some degree of disappointment, I only managed to produce four points that are widely agreed upon. But, in retrospect, I think that these four fundamental truths, if we can call them that, are important and need to be discussed. Which are, then, these four fundamental truths?

The first one is this: cross-border online interactions fulfil a valuable function and must be actively protected. In a sense, I am saying two things there. The first part is perhaps just an observation of the value of cross-border in online interaction and I think that one would be largely uncontroversial. The second is maybe more a call to some sort of action. After all, I am saying that we must actively protect these online interactions. Many people may agree with that, but I think that something we might not so far have paid enough attention to, is stressing how fragile the online environment actually is and what we have to do to protect it.

The second fundamental truth is that the Internet cannot be allowed to be a lawless space. We might take that for granted today but if we go back to the 90’s we immediately see that there was a very healthy, or perhaps in a sense unhealthy, debate about whether or not the law should apply to the Internet at all[2]. That was a serious legal discussion and anytime Ι feel that we are not making enough progress nowadays, I think back to how it used to be when we were actually debating whether or not the law applied to the Internet at all. We are not having to engage in those discussions anymore. We need the law to keep the Internet functioning and private international law is, of course, a very important aspect of that.

Now, to turn to some observations that might be more problematic in a sense. The third fundamental truth is that every country has the interest –the legitimate interest, I would say– in regulating what content is available online in that country. Now, while that is true, it also, in part, explains why we have a lot of problems in applying law online. Because in the end, we have, as a result, many countries with some legitimate interest in regulating what happens online, but, so far, we in essence still have one single Internet. So, there is certainly a degree of conflict there, or a clash, in a sense.

Finally, the fourth fundamental truth that I have identified, is that no country or other actor has the right to exercise control over the Internet as a whole. There have been, from time to time, discussions of how we can treat the Internet like an international shared space, with some commentators drawing parallels between 301the Internet and the “high seas” or “outer space”[3]. While those are interesting ideas, I do not think we will find solutions there. It is a combination of fundamental truths (3) and (4) that we need to work with here: every country has an interest in regulating, but no one should be allowed to push that regulatory interest/authority too far. So, there is always going to be a clash between those two fundamental truths, one that we need to reconcile and balance, as far as we can. Because as soon as one country needs to reach another country’s activity to regulate things, then we will, potentially, encounter problems.

These are, then, the four fundamental truths I was able to identify when working on my latest book. However, I have since taken the opportunity to frequently ask the people to whom I present whether anyone can suggest other such “fundamental truths on which there is near universal agreement”. And, I am pleased to here add a fifth fundamental truth based on the suggestion by one of the students I taught in Göttingen (Germany) in June 2022; that is, there is a value in increasing Internet accessibility. The distribution of Internet access is uneven, both as between different countries, and within countries as between societal groups. Overcoming this is, at least, as much a technical and a political issue as it is a legal issue. However, there can be no doubt that law (including private international law) should be structured so as to support the goal of increasing Internet accessibility and thus I agree that this may usefully be added as a fifth fundamental truth.

Beyond these fundamental truths, the application of private international law to the Internet is characterised by disagreement. Thus, let us now turn to the six key problems I discussed at the Lex&Forum webinar.

Problem 1: Hyper-regulation

The first problem is what I have sometimes called “hyper-regulation”. I have, in some writings[4], tried to define what that means with some precision but for our purposes here today it might suffice to say that in the online environment most actors are subject to such a degree of regulation, that any sort of intention to comply with all those rules or laws is futile. And my claim that we are currently in an era of 302hyper-regulation is supported by the stakeholder survey carried out within the Internet & Jurisdiction Global Status Report 2019: “Some interviewed experts noted that although governments in the past largely took the view that Internet regulation was difficult or impossible, the political will to regulate the Internet is now stronger than ever”[5].

The reality is that it is simply impossible to purposely comply with all the laws to which one may be exposed when engaging in activities online. And I think it is worthwhile to go back, quite a bit, in time and explore where and when we started heading in this direction.

As an Australian citizen and resident, I must bring up the famous Gutnick case[6], because it was the first time that the highest court of any country dealt with an international cross-border Internet defamation type scenario. The facts are probably known to many of the readers. However, put briefly, the Gutnick case involved a man in Australia (Mr Gutnick), in Victoria to be precise, who wanted to take action against a US publisher (Dow Jones & Company Inc.) for a publication occurring online. The case had a lot of interesting aspects, for example, it focused on a subscription service and while we could talk about those things, we need not go into the details here. What is important is that, while I do not necessarily disagree with the outcome of the Gutnick case, there were a few worrying aspects of the decision and none more worrying for me is this statement: “… However broad may be the reach of any particular means of communication, those who make information accessible by a particular method do so knowing of the reach that their information may have. In particular, those who post information on the World Wide Web do so knowing that the information that they make available is available to all and sundry without any geographic restriction…”[7].

I have several concerns with that statement, and indeed the position the Court adopts through that statement. My most fundamental concern is that this statement has, in a sense, set the state of mind for regulators. The idea that if you put something online then you are intending to reach the whole world, was not correct back in the time when the Gutnick case was decided, and it certainly is not correct today. When your local pizza restaurant is placing its menu on the Internet, it is quite clearly not trying to sell pizza to the world. The Internet is now very much a place where we communicate on different geographical levels: we communicate locally, we communicate internationally, globally, and so on. But it is clear that the choice to rely on Internet communication is not, in and of itself, always an indication of an intention to gain an international reach. Unfortunately, nonetheless, that has 303been the mindset of the regulators since. And we can feel the negative effects of that mindset.

An example I often use, and that I indeed used during my Lex&Forum presentation, is this: Let’s say, for example, that you find one of my presentations, or perhaps this article, to be of very poor quality and that you go on to your favourite social media site and start writing something defamatory about me and my presentation style. In such a situation what country’s law should you, then, take into account? If you happen to be sitting in Greece, Greek law might be of obvious relevance. But that is just the start of the matter. As I live and work in Australia, Australian law might matter. I come from Sweden and have maintained my Swedish citizenship, so a lawsuit in Sweden cannot be excluded and Swedish law may be of relevance. Further, I teach and give presentations in various places in the world where I might have some sort of working reputation that could lead to litigation in those places. Already in what has been said so far, it is clear that there is a number of countries whose law you ought to consider if writing something that may defame me. Then –given that defamation law often attaches significance to the location at which a defamatory statement enters the mind of a third person– you should probably also consider the location of all your “friends”, as we so liberally call them online, or connections on LinkedIn etc. Indeed, you need to consider where people are at the time they read your posting. As a sidenote, we can here observe that if you happen to know where all your friends are at any given time, then there is probably some form of privacy violation that you are engaging in. Further, there is the matter of re-publications. Arguably, to assess your legal risk exposure you ought to know the location of your “friends’ friends” at the time they read any re-publication of your initial post. My point is that, in the end, we simply cannot know all the potential laws that might apply, and, therefore, we cannot feel safe in the knowledge that what we are doing is lawful under any law that could come into play. So, that is a fundamental problem, which I think we can trace back to the sort of reasoning we saw articulated in the Gutnick case.

And it is not a small problem. Facebook has now, roughly, 2.9 billion monthly active users, Tik Tok has just gotten past the billion (although that number may be affected by the very recent revelations as to Tik Tok data being sent to its Chinese parent company)[8], and so on. While most people might not post things that are at risk of being held as defamatory, we all might be putting up content that is seen as very innocent in the place where we live but might be unlawful in other places. To see that this is so, we need only consider the Russian laws restricting news reporting of the invasion of Ukraine.

304There is a lot that I would like to say about this issue but in the interest of keeping this article brief, I am not going to dwell on it too much. Put simply, the reality is that in an online environment we cannot identify all the laws that apply to us, we can, of course, not access all laws that apply to us, we might not be able to understand them and there might be contradictions between the laws that do apply to us. This has severe practical implications. But it also goes to the core of how law is meant to work. As well-known, there is a principle dictating that ignorance of the law is not an excuse[9]. This is, of course, an important, long-standing, legal principle but at the same time, we know, nowadays, that when acting online, we cannot possibly know all the laws that can apply to us. There is a bit of a clash there, I would say.

In this context, commentators used to say things like “… with few exceptions, governments can use their coercive powers only within their borders and control offshore Internet communications only by controlling local intermediaries, local assets and local persons…”[10]. The idea was, I suppose, that it does not matter which laws apply so much because the governments cannot control us very strictly anyhow. But I think we need to remove the words “only” from the statement mentioned above. A more realistic statement is that “... with few exceptions, governments can use their coercive powers only within their borders and control offshore Internet communication only by controlling local intermediaries, local assets and local persons…”. And this is something I will get back to later in this article, because I think that is very important. What it means is that online we do not find the sort of dependency on enforcement in foreign jurisdictions, that normally would work as a balancing aspect for us.

Problem 2: Too little private international law expertise applied to the Internet

Pointing to the second major problem, I think that private international law experts have had too little influence on the direction of how we regulate the Internet. And, I think we can blame both the Internet governance community and the private international law community for that. Put simply, the Internet governance community has failed to recognise the role that private international law may play, and too few private international law experts have taken the time to engage with the Internet as a topic. To use a metaphor, private international law treats offline as the main course and the online environment is viewed as a side dish that people sometimes take a little bit of an interest in. That is a big problem and to confirm that this is the case, one need only pick up a private international law book and see that 305the book will most likely be focused on offline, maybe with an extra chapter on the online issues.

This needs to change because there is so much that the private international law community could do to help, guide, and steer the direction of how we manage the Internet. It is, of course, complicated, because the Internet develops very quickly and, therefore, it is a burden to engage with the Internet issues. I also understand that not everyone is very interested in Internet regulation. But I think that we could all benefit a lot more from the private international law community.

Just to showcase the difference in pace, one can consider the example of the 2005 Hague Convention on the choice of court agreements[11]. When the work on the 2005 Hague Convention started, originally as a judgment project in 1992, there were fifty websites. By the time the Hague Convention was concluded, YouTube was launched, and we had a hundred million websites. Technology develops quickly and our laws slowly. But we need more private international law experts to cope with that burden.

Problem 3: The approach to service providers

The next problem I wanted to discuss relates to how the law approaches service providers. So far, regulation of service providers has been in focus mainly outside the area of private international law. But the problem, in essence, is this: we constantly say that service providers like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc, have too much power. Why should they get to decide what is available online, is a standard argument. At the same time, we say that these same service providers do not do enough; why did they not take this or that content down and so on. Both these claims have legitimacy, but they also clash and so far, we have not seen this clash being discussed much in the context of private international law. But I think we are heading in that direction and the Equustek case[12] from Canada, from a few years ago, is a good illustration of that. So, this is an issue and private international law has a role to play here. But I recognise that it is also a broader issue that extends beyond private international law.

Problem 4: Quality of law-making

The quality of law-making is the fourth problem that I have identified. It used to be that courts were quite willing to acknowledge that they might struggle with applying existing laws to the Internet. There has been a famous statement, from now 25 years ago, that reads as follows: “... Judges and legislators faced with adapting existing legal standards to the novel environment of cyberspace struggle 306with terms and concepts that the average [...] five-year-old tosses about with breezy familiarity…”[13]. I doubt we will see many such frank self-assessments today.

Courts and legislators have, of course, become better at dealing with legal topics in the online context, but it is rare nowadays to see courts acknowledging these problems anymore. There is an assumption that they know what they are talking about but that is unfortunately not always the case. For example, while I have the greatest respect for the Court of Justice of the European Union and the skilled judges there, one illustration of the problems can be found in the case law of the CJEU, specifically in case C-194/16, Bolagsupplysningen OÜ and Ingrid Ilsjah v. Svensk Handel AB. There is one statement in this case, which is particularly illustrative of the problems that arise when courts work on online matters. The claim of the Court that I find particularly important is the following:

“... in the light of the ubiquitous nature of the information and content placed online on a website and the fact that the scope of their distribution is, in principle, universal (see, to that effect, judgment of 25 October 2011, eDate Advertising and Others, C-509/09 and C-161/10, EU:C:2011:685, paragraph 46), an application for the rectification of the former and the removal of the latter is a single and indivisible application and can, consequently, only be made before a court with jurisdiction to rule on the entirety of an application for compensation for damage pursuant to the case-law resulting from the judgments of 7 March 1995, Shevill and Others (C-68/93, EU:C:1995:61, paragraphs 25, 26 and 32), and of 25 October 2011, eDate Advertising and Others (C-509/09 and C-161/10, EU:C:2011:685, paragraphs 42 and 48), and not before a court that does not have jurisdiction to do so…”[14].

This statement is completely at odds with reality. If you are in Greece and go online, using a search engine for example, you will get completely different search results to what I am getting, since the search results partly are based on where you are geographically located. It is well known that websites can target content based on your location. So, the idea that you cannot remove content only for one area is completely wrong. And even if somebody would not agree with this observation, I would say that here we have a court, which by the way followed the Opinion of AG Bobek[15] almost word for word on this matter, that is relying on an assessment of technology made in the eDate case back in 2011. Even worse, this court is applying that outdated technological assessment, and is assuming that it holds true also in 2017 when the Bolagsupplysningen case was decided. As a matter of legal method, that is something –I would say– seriously wrong. We cannot, and should not, assume that technology stands still in those intervening six years.

307Problem 5: Scope of jurisdiction

This takes us to a topic that I have written a lot about lately[16]. It is the problem of the “scope of jurisdiction” which is also one of my biggest concerns.

What is this problem about? Let us say that we have a judgment relating to the removal of content online or the award of damages as a result of defamation online. Essentially, even if a court claims jurisdiction on some legitimate basis, there is still another jurisdictional question, in my view, related to the scope of that jurisdiction. In the case of a lawsuit for damages, the court can award damages on a global basis or a local basis or something in between. And, in the case of an action to have certain content removed, the court might demand that the content is removed locally as in within the relevant country, globally, or somewhere in between, maybe EU-wide if we are talking about EU content. This is always a matter of degree and I think lawyers, and not least private international law experts, adopt some sort of more binary thinking: can a court claim jurisdiction or not? But they usually miss the dimension of the degree of jurisdiction.

The thinking that we often see is that to be effective, an order needs to have global scope[17]. One might agree with that when it comes to the delisting based on the right to be forgotten within the European data privacy law. But if we were to apply this reasoning, we might have to do the same when it comes to Pakistan’s blasphemy rules or Belarusian or Russian political dissent rules. It becomes unsustainable to always go for global orders in my view. So, global orders are appropriate in some settings but not as a default position.

An example may be illustrative. Let us imagine that I put some content online and it happens to be unlawful under the laws of China. If I am being sued for defamation, my Chinese counterpart must somehow come and get a judgment enforced against me in Australia, but if the content in question is lawful in Australia, then Australian law may protect me. So, the need for enforcement is a very important balancing aspect of private international law. But what if instead, I have posted something on LinkedIn for example and the content is lawful in Australia, and in the US but unlawful in China. If China takes action against LinkedIn and LinkedIn complies with that order, which they might want to do if they are active in China, then there is simply no need for recognition and enforcement. That balancing aspect is completely removed and, in the end, the only law that decides the question as to whether or not my content stays up is Chinese law, even though Australian law and/308or US law should matter as well. This is, in my opinion, a system failure and a very big concern.

So far, we talk about these matters in relation to delisting orders, removing orders, blocking orders, and so on. But we’re seeing more and more of what we can call “must-carry orders”, namely orders to retain or re-upload the content that needs to stay up. I take this opportunity to strongly encourage the private international law community to engage more with these matters.

Problem 6: Silos, including that between PIL and PIL

Siloing is something I am not going to speak much about, but it is a problem as far as I am concerned. Perhaps the issue of siloing is best illustrated by asking one person from the private international law community and one person from the public international law community what the abbreviation “PIL” stands for. The private international law expert is highly likely to confidently say that PIL stands for Private International Law. At the same time, the public international law expert may, with equally string confidence, proclaim that PIL stands for Public International Law. I think that it is amazing that both communities describe their discipline as PIL, seemingly unaware that the other does so, too.

To make progress with how we govern the Internet, we need to overcome this siloing between PIL and PIL. There is not much discussion between the private international law community and the public international law community on these matters. But both can certainly and also need to learn a lot from each other.

In fact, I have argued[18], and many others have argued[19], too, that private international law and public international law are actually two sides of the same coin, in a sense; at least as far as jurisdictional matters are concerned[20]. I have put together a framework that I argue is applicable as outlining rules and jurisdiction within both public and private international law. I include it here, but will not elaborate on it here as I have written much about it elsewhere[21].

309In absence of an obligation under international law to exercise jurisdiction, a State may only exercise jurisdiction where:

(1) There is a substantial connection between the matter and the State seeking to exercise jurisdiction;

(2) The State seeking to exercise jurisdiction has a legitimate interest in the matter; and

(3) The exercise of jurisdiction is reasonable, given the balance between the State’s legitimate interests and other interests.

Concluding remarks

To conclude, I wish to refer to an interesting study from 2019 involving some interviews and also surveys[22]. What came through very clearly is that there is a general feeling that we are not heading towards solutions, but that we are heading towards more and more problems in this field. Indeed, 95% of the surveyed experts saw cross-border legal challenges on the Internet becoming increasingly acute in the next three years[23]. But for me, the message that stood out most clearly was this one, someone said that: “...the Internet is neither the problem, nor the cause of the problem. The Internet risks becoming the victim…”[24].

And this ties back to what I addressed above. I think we need to start thinking about the online environment like we think of the natural environment. An environment we need to protect because it is under threat. And private international law can certainly play a role in protecting the online environment. And if anyone wonders if the risks are real, I would like to refer to the World Economic Forum that every year publishes a report about the global risk landscape.

In the World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Risks Report, both “Cyber-attacks”and “Critical information infrastructure breakdown” were ranked higher in both impact and likelihood than was “Spread of infectious diseases”[25]. Yet, at the time of writing, the world is still experiencing the extraordinary impact of a global pandemic and given the extent to which we now, more than ever, rely on the online environment, it is certainly fortunate that we are not simultaneously experiencing crippling technology failures.

310The Internet plays a central role in the lives of billions of people, facilitating cross-border contacts, trade, and the sharing of ideas and knowledge. To date, its relative robustness has made it easy to overlook just how fragile the online environment really is. But it is now increasingly apparent that this fragile environment needs to be actively protected to ensure its survival in the form often taken for granted today.

[1] D. Svantesson, Private International Law and the Internet4, Kluwer Law International (2021).

[2] Consider, for example, the debate between Johnson and Post (D. Johnson/D. Post, Law and Borders–The Rise of Law in Cyberspace, Stanford Law Review 1996. 48) on the one hand, and Goldsmith (J. L. Goldsmith, Against Cyberanarchy, University of Chicago Law Review 1998. 65) on the other hand.

[3] An early example of this is found in the writings of Menthe (D. C. Menthe, Jurisdiction in Cyberspace: A Theory of International Spaces, Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review 1998. 4), but the idea is periodically regurgitated as a novel one by scholars who seem to overlook Menthe’s early writings on the topic.

[4] See e.g., D. Svantesson, Are we Stuck in an Era of Jurisdictional Hyper-regulation?, in P. Wahlgren (ed.), Scandinavian Studies in Law: 50 Years of Law and IT, Vol. 65 (2018), 143-157, in which I describe “hyper-regulation” as characterised by the following conditions:

“(1) the complexity of a party’s contextual legal system (i.e., the combination of all laws that purport to apply to that party in a given context) amounts to an insurmountable obstacle to legal compliance; and

(2) the prospect of legal enforcement of (at least parts of) the laws that make up the contextual legal system is more than a theoretical possibility”.

[5] D. Svantesson, Internet & Jurisdiction Global Status Report 2019, Paris, Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network (2019), 51.

[6] Dow Jones & Company Inc. v. Gutnick (2002) 210 CLR 575.

[7] Dow Jones & Company Inc. v. Gutnick (2002) 210 CLR 575, 605.

[8] See e.g., C. Wilson, TikTok app is connecting to Chinese servers, cybersecurity company says, Crikey [https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/07/18/tiktok-app-connecting-to-chinese-servers-report/].

[9] Ignorantia juris non excusat.

[10] J. Goldsmith/T. Wu, Who Controls the Internet?, Oxford University Press (2008), 159 (emphasis added).

[11] Convention of 30 June 2005 on Choice of Court Agreements [http://www.hcch.net/index_en.php?act=conventions.text&cid=98].

[12] Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., 2017 SCC 34.

[13] American Libraries Association v. Pataki [969 F.Supp. 160, 170 (SDNY, 1997)] per J. Preska.

[14] Case C-194/16, Bolagsupplysningen OÜ Ingrid Ilsjan v. Svensk Handel AB, § 48.

[15] Opinion of Advocate General Bobek delivered on 13 July 2017 in case C-194/16, Bolagsupplysningen OÜ Ingrid Ilsjan v. Svensk Handel AB.

[16] See e.g., D. Svantesson, “Scope of Jurisdiction”–A Key Battleground for Private International Law Applied to the Internet, Yearbook of Private International Law, Vol. 22 (2020/2021), 245-274; D. Svantesson, Scope of jurisdiction online and the importance of messaging–Lessons from Australia and the EU, Computer Law & Security Review 2020. 38, Article 105428; D. Svantesson, Private International Law and the Internet4, Kluwer Law International (2021), 25-30, 387-401, and 564-573.

[17] See e.g., Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., 2017 SCC 34.

[18] D. Svantesson, The Relation between Public International Law and Private International Law in the Internet Context, Yearbook of New Zealand Jurisprudence special edition (2006), Vol. 9, 154-160.

[19] See e.g., J. Crawford, Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law8, Oxford University Press (2012), 471: “[A]s civil jurisdiction is ultimately reinforced by criminal sanctions through contempt of court, there is in principle no great difference between the problems created by assertion of civil and criminal jurisdiction over aliens”.

[20] Consider also how certain fields, such as data privacy law, fall within both private and public international law [see further, D. Svantesson, Extraterritoriality in Data Privacy Law, Ex Tuto (2013); I. Revolidis, Judicial Jurisdiction over Internet Privacy Violations and the GDPR: a Case of “Privacy Tourism”?, 11(1) Masaryk UJL & Tech 2017. 7].

[21] See e.g., D. Svantesson, Solving the Internet Jurisdiction Puzzle, Oxford University Press (2017); R. Polcak/D. Svantesson, Information Sovereignty–Data Privacy, Sovereign Powers and the Rule of Law, Edward Elgar Publishing (2017); D. Svantesson, A New Jurisprudential Framework for Jurisdiction: Beyond the Harvard Draft, 109 American Journal of International Law Unbound 2015. 69, [https://www.asil.org/blogs/new-jurisprudential-framework-jurisdiction-beyond-harvard-draft].

[22] D. Svantesson, Internet & Jurisdiction Global Status Report 2019, Paris, Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network 2019.

[23] D. Svantesson, Internet & Jurisdiction Global Status Report 2019, Paris, Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network 2019, 28.

[24] D. Svantesson, Internet & Jurisdiction Global Status Report 2019, Paris, Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network 2019, 17.

[25] World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 201914, [http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2019.pdf].