Green WiFi: how regulation sort of works (WHY2025)

This talk is based on my experience working for Comcast/Sky Group in WLAN (802.11) standardisation. It follows the trajectory from environmental laws through to technical regulations and finally in to technical standards, patents and technologies. The talk argues that well-enforced norms and regulations remain a good way of incentivising socially and globally desirable outcomes, while explaining how technical regulations and standardisation work in practice from the industry insider perspective. A version of this presentation was previously given at the SICT Summer School at ULB in Brussels. It will also be presented at Bornhack and BalcCon in 2025. I feel like such a talk is especially important now that Europe is no longer under an American security umberella. Europe consistently fails in pushing a rules-based world order, while, in fact, it is difficult to see any other form of world order work either for Europe or indeed the vast majority of countries. We have many parallel examples from privacy, security and data protection law where Europe, again, fails to understand and identify its own critical interests. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/YUAA7M/