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Interop

Interoperability as a Design Principle in the Digital Economy

March 24, 2026

Organized by the NET Institute, UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society and the Fubon Center.

This workshop examines interoperability not merely as a technical standard but as a policy tool for reshaping digital architectures characterized by hyperscalers, network effects, and data-driven complementarities. As digital infrastructures—from operating systems and cloud platforms to payments and AI systems—exhibit superlinear returns to scale and multi-sided feedback loops that generate persistent bottlenecks, regulators increasingly turn to interoperability mandates to counter market concentration. Such interventions may however also risk diluting beneficial complementarities, creating security vulnerabilities, and dampening investment incentives, demanding careful calibration. 

The workshop, which will discuss some of the issues raised by this paper, adopts a multidisciplinary approach, integrating insights from network economics, business strategy, and innovation economics to develop a richer conceptual framework. We conceptualize digital ecosystems as lattices of complementarities—linking users, developers, data, and infrastructure—where scaling laws serve as empirical signatures of supermodular relationships. This framing enables deeper analysis of how interoperability obligations redistribute network complementarities across ecosystem layers and whether horizontal versus vertical interoperability mandates differ in their structural effects.
 

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Agenda

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9:00 - Registration, Continental breakfast 

9:10 - Opening remarks: Dean Bharat Anand, Stern NYU and Arun Sundararajan, Stern NYU 

9:15 - Introductory remarks: Nicholas Economides, Stern NYU

9:20 – 10:00 

Vint Cerf, Google (remotely)

10:00 – 11:20

Moderator: Ioannis Lianos, UCL Laws & NYU Law School 

Nicholas Economides, Stern NYU 

Barry Nalebuff, Yale School of Management (remotely) 

Howard Shelanski, Georgetown University 

Tommaso Valletti, Imperial College London (remotely) 

Xavier Vives, IESE Business School (remotely)

11:20 – 11:35 

11:35 – 13:00 

Moderator: Nicholas Economides, Stern NYU 

Eliana Garcés, ALP Economics 

Gonenc Gurkaynak, ELIG & UCL 

Rossitza Kotzeva, European Commission (remotely) 

Richard Reisman, Teleshuttle Corporation & The Foundation of American Innovation 

Marshall Van Alstyne, Boston University (remotely)

13:00 – 13:40 

13:40 – 15:10 

Moderator: Christos Makridis, Arizona State University & Gallup 

Oliver Bethel, Google (invited) 

Harry First, NYU Law School 

Eleanor Fox, NYU Law School 

Scott Hemphill, NYU Law School 

Ioannis Lianos, UCL Laws & NYU Law School 

Dan Rubinfeld, NYU Law School and UC Berkeley

15:10 – 15:25 

15:25 – 16:45 

Moderator: Eleanor Fox, NYU Law School 

Elettra Bietti, Northeastern with Daji Landis, NYU and Sunoo Park, NYU Courant Institute 

Martin Gaynor, Carnegie Mellon University 

Christopher Yoo, University of Pennsylvania 

Tim Wu, Columbia Law School (invited) 

Nicolo Zingales, FGV Brazil

16:45-17:45 

Moderator: Ioannis Lianos, UCL Laws & NYU Law School 

Victor Oliveira Fernandes, CADE & IDP 

Christos Makridis, Arizona State University & Gallup 

Christopher Sprigman, NYU Law School 

Arun Sundararajan, Stern NYU