How to Govern the Confidence Machine?

ABSTRACT Emerging technologies pose many new challenges for regulation and governance on a global scale. With the advent of distributed communication networks like the Internet and decentralized ledger technologies like blockchain, new platforms emerged, disrupting existing power dynamics and bringing about new claims of sovereignty from the private sector. This special issue addresses a gap in the literature by focusing the discourse on the issue of trust and confidence in the digital realm. In particular, looking at the evolution of the web (from Web 1.0, to Web 2.0, and then Web 3), this article analyses how every iteration reflects a different way of dealing with the problem of trust online, resulting in a different regulation and governance landscape. Technology is often regarded as a new lever of regulation, attempting to resolve the problem of “trust” online, either through the introduction of a new trusted authority (Web 2.0) or through the introduction of technological guarantees that provide more assurance—or “confidence”—in the way interactions can be operationalized (Web 3). Yet, each of these technologies also introduce new risks and governance costs, ultimately shifting the problem of trust in a new direction rather than resolving it or removing the need for trust altogether. The main contribution of the articles in this special issue is providing a better understanding of the trust challenges faced and posed by emerging technologies and demonstrating how they affect institutional governance—in both theory and practice—with a view to help policymakers find appropriate answers to these challenges.