Contestability

From Telephone Unbundling to Digital Bottlenecks: The Telecommunications Act of 1996, Antitrust Enforcement, and a Function-Specific Access Regime

Digital bottleneck regulation becomes governable only when access duties are attached to specific functions, backed by reviewable designation evidence, and supervised by institutions capable of enforcing technical terms over time.

Algorithmic Law in Contemporary Brazil: From Cyber-Libertarianism to Constitutional Rights

Digital constitutionalism changes who can govern platform conduct, but the legitimacy of expanded protective powers depends on enforceable limits, reviewable moderation decisions, and remedies for both unlawful content and wrongful suppression.

Accountability in AI and Automated Decision-Making: From Explainability to Reviewable Administrative Governance

An automated public decision is accountable only when public institutions can independently examine its conditions of production and compel its correction, not merely explain its output.

Invisible Government, Visible Accountability: A Governance Framework for Proactive Public Services in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Proactive government does not remove administrative power when it removes citizen-facing steps; it shifts that power into less visible back-office coordination, so every reduction in friction should be matched by stronger traceability, contestability, and accountable authority.

Predicting pandemics, predicting people: the ethical limits of AI-powered public health surveillance

The legitimate boundary of AI public-health surveillance is not the point at which prediction becomes technically possible, but the point at which institutions can no longer justify, constrain, contest, and retire the resulting power over people.

Police Narratives on Ethical Issues of Big Data: A Sociotechnical Approach

Ethical discourse can weaken governance when institutions use it to project responsibility outward, secure legitimacy, and manage public acceptance without surrendering discretion or creating enforceable constraints.

ANCHOR Guidelines: A Constitutional Blueprint for Human-Centred Judicial AI in India

Keeping a human judge formally in charge does not by itself preserve judicial legitimacy; a governable judicial-AI regime must also make algorithmic influence, institutional operators, override incentives, and avenues for contestation independently auditable.

The Right to Privacy in Tanzania in the Era of Digital Surveillance: A Critical Analysis of the Adequacy of the Legal Framework

A constitutional privacy right does not meaningfully govern surveillance unless the state also constrains who may authorize surveillance, how necessity is tested, who independently reviews its exercise, and how affected persons can obtain remedy.

Algorithmic Ballistics and the 0-Reach Paradox: A Forensic Log Translation Methodology for 1.25 Million Time-Stamped Records

Forensic governance of opaque platforms improves when observations, integrity claims, correlations, causal hypotheses, and external determinations are kept as separate evidence states that can be independently challenged.

Admissibility of AI-generated digital evidence in criminal proceedings: A framework for enhancing judicial reliability in Sri Lanka

AI-generated evidence should acquire courtroom authority only through a verifiable evidentiary process that preserves provenance, transformation history, disclosure, independent challenge, and judicial control.

Governing Smart Energy with Responsible AI: A Comparative Legal Framework for Algorithmic Governance and Energy Justice

Responsible AI governance in essential services becomes meaningful only when transparency is connected to identifiable institutional responsibility, accessible contestation, and enforceable remedy.

The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure

The paper successfully makes platform control over agent access a governance object, but its delegation-transparency-proportionality triad remains normative infrastructure in design form until access disputes have shared evidence, revocation, adjudication, and remedy.

Structural Preconditions of Algorithmic Sovereignty: Informational Fragility and the Institutional Architecture of AI Governance

GPAS measures the administrative preconditions for algorithmic sovereignty more convincingly than it measures legitimate sovereignty itself, because informational coherence and state capacity do not establish contestability, institutional independence, or justified public authority.

Artificial Intelligence and Electoral Democracy in Nigeria: Political Participation, Information Integrity and The Future of Democratic Governance

The paper convincingly reframes electoral AI as an institutional evidence problem rather than a detection problem, but it offers a governance agenda rather than a governance architecture until authority for authenticity disputes, correction, platform enforcement, and redress is specified.

Multi-stakeholder transparency evaluation and dynamic accountability mechanisms for AI-assisted criminal sentencing

Traceability can preserve evidence about an AI-assisted sentencing decision, but accountability exists only when institutions attach that evidence to authority, contestation, remedy, and enforceable consequence.

People Are Not Just Their Countries. Disentangling Social Determinants of LLM Value Alignment Across Europe

Measuring which populations an LLM resembles is evidence about representational distribution, not a mandate for whose values the system should implement; moving from country averages to demographic granularity makes the legitimacy of the alignment target more, not less, important.

Critique of Agent Model

The paper correctly identifies that advanced agents redistribute control by internalising goals, identity, deliberation, and learning, but it mistakes architectural visibility for governability: an inspectable module is not an accountable institution unless authority, constraint, revocation, evidence, and redress are executable around it.

Moving control does not remove the governance problem

External policy engines, registries, platform access controls and other control-plane mechanisms can make governance more executable while simultaneously concentrating authority in the institutions that operate those mechanisms.

Recent reviews repeatedly show that moving constraints outside an agent or application improves enforceability but does not establish the legitimacy, accountability or contestability of the new decision point.

Measurement does not confer legitimacy

Provenance, representational similarity, perceived acceptance, administrative coherence and other measurable properties can establish facts about a system without establishing who is entitled to decide, whose values should prevail or whether an action is legitimate.

Reviews now reach the same boundary from measurement, public-administration and state-capacity work: evidence about acceptance, coherence or representation can support analysis without supplying justified authority, contestability or institutional constraint.

How are delegated powers revoked and contested after deployment?

Agent governance proposals increasingly define duties and delegated authority, but operational revocation, evidence preservation, correction, restoration and redress remain less specified than initial authorization.

A governance system that can grant authority but cannot reliably withdraw or contest it creates persistent decision rights without a complete lifecycle.

Who governs the infrastructure that declares authority?

Registries, trust lists and resolver services can make issuer or agent authority legible, but the archive repeatedly leaves open how admission, suspension, update, appeal, operator accountability and conflicting authority sources should be governed.

A registry can improve provenance while simultaneously becoming a concentrated gatekeeper whose own authority and error-correction mechanisms determine who can participate.

Who decides when authoritative evidence conflicts?

Governance proposals increasingly improve provenance, verification and transparency without specifying how conflicting authenticity, authority or policy determinations are adjudicated when multiple institutions can make plausible claims.

Better evidence infrastructure can make disagreement more visible without resolving it. Without decision rights, evidentiary thresholds, correction procedures and appeal, a dispute can simply migrate into whichever institution controls the verification or access layer.

AI Agents and the Next Layer of India's Digital Infrastructure → Critique of Agent Model

Both reviews treat the agent model as institutionally incomplete when authority, accountability and governance are not made operational.

Designing Loyalty: AI Agents and Conflicts of Interest → The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure

Both treat user-authorized agent action as delegated authority rather than generic automation, while the agentic-web review adds platform gatekeeping power as a separate governance boundary over whether delegated entitlement can be exercised.

Procedural fairness, accountability, and legitimacy in the AI-enabled state: evidence from China → Structural Preconditions of Algorithmic Sovereignty: Informational Fragility and the Institutional Architecture of AI Governance

Both examine legitimacy around AI-enabled public authority and expose a common boundary: perceived acceptance or administrative coherence can describe institutional conditions without establishing that authority is contestable, constrained or justified.

Building a National Digital Trust Architecture for India: From Digital Identity and Data Exchange to Federated Institutional Trust → Artificial Intelligence and Electoral Democracy in Nigeria: Political Participation, Information Integrity and The Future of Democratic Governance

Both make provenance and verification supporting evidence rather than final authority. Each ultimately requires institutional rules for conflicting evidence, correction, relying decisions and redress.