Digital Governance and Legal Regulation in the Information Society

Abstract

The transition to an information society governed increasingly through code, platforms, and data flows has generated distinctive challenges for legal regulation, which has traditionally organized itself around territorially 
bounded, state-centric authority. This chapter analyses the conceptual foundations of digital governance, surveys competing regulatory models—state command-and-control, industry self-regulation, and multistakeholder 
governance—and analyses India's evolving statutory architecture from the Information Technology Act, 2000 through the Intermediary Guidelines of 2021 to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. It considers 
intermediary liability jurisprudence, the constitutional anchoring of digital rights following the recognition of informational privacy, and the ongoing difficulties of governing inherently transnational digital infrastructures 
through domestic legal instruments.