Despite receiving their share of hefty court fines, for many years the giants of Big Tech have seemed impervious to being held to account in a truly meaningful way.

Yet there are signs that the tide is beginning to turn. See, for instance, the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s fresh approach to competition law in its recent decision to force Meta to sell one of its acquisitions, Giphy. Further to this, 2023 saw the formation of the first Africa Content Moderators Union, underscoring the power of such workers within the Big Tech ecosystem. In the words of Rosa Curling, a director at Foxglove – a UK-based group that is fighting for ‘tech justice’ – these workers are ‘crucial’ to the tech giants. ‘Imagine’, she poses, ‘if they all went on strike for a week’.

Our cover feature in this edition of Global Insight, ‘Levelling with the tech giants’, explores how litigation, unionisation and regulation – both by states and by tech companies themselves – can help ensure accountability for even the world’s most powerful companies through the rule of law.

We have become accustomed to the significance of Big Tech in our lives. Artificial intelligence (AI), meanwhile, is not new but the speed of its recent development is the cause of much concern, excitement and hyperbole.

Legislators worldwide are in a tight spot, caught between seeking to regulate the safe use of AI and harnessing the opportunities it presents, as our US Correspondent William Roberts writes in his column for this issue (‘Walking a tightrope on AI regulation’). Here, the rule of law again has an important role to play, a point that’s being recognised by, for example, EU lawmakers, who are in the process of crafting a comprehensive legal framework for AI. The EU’s AI Act takes a risk-based approach, but also includes prohibitions on biometrics based on race and gender, facial and emotion recognition, including limits on law enforcement. In short, it might be hoped that the legislation will curb AI’s worst excesses before the technology becomes out of our reach.

As we prepare to mark two years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the column in this edition written by Iryna Mudra, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine, describes recent progress towards the establishment of another means of ensuring accountability: an international mechanism to compensate Ukraine for the horrors of Russia’s war. In her article, ‘Compensating Ukraine’, Mudra details how 94 countries have endorsed at UN level the idea of using assets seized from Russia to pay compensation to Ukrainians affected by the war, overcoming the concept of sovereign immunity that once blocked such a process.

We hope that you enjoy this edition.