Political technology is defined, not as Russians define it as a synonym for politics, but as the 'supply-side engineering of the political system for partisan advantage'. Such manipulation is now common across many types of regimes: deteriorating democracies, so-called smart authoritarianisms and hybrid regimes, but particularly the latter. Manipulation techniques spread through various types of globalisation. Political manipulation can no longer be orientalised: corruption, judicial capture, propaganda and artificial structures to spread it are also increasingly prevalent in the West.

In its 2020 survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer identified a paradox: ‘despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures – government, business, NGOs and media – is trusted’.1 This is a rather grim sounding paradox. One can try to resolve it in a variety of ways. An obvious way would be to argue that when we measure trust, we are measuring a rather uninformative quantity. After all, trust can be considered good and a loss of trust would accordingly be bad only if and insofar as trust is placed in something or someone actually worthy of our trust. So, the true problem, one could argue, is not the loss of trust but the loss of trustworthiness – and this has not been measured.2 Whether trust is a good proxy for trustworthiness has yet to be established.

This chapter examines the response proposed by the OECD Secretariat to the challenges to the international tax framework posed by the digital economy. The challenges are very different because some, such as the allocation of taxing rights and taxable nexus, are comparatively recent challenges emerging from the enormous success of the digitalisation of the economy. As companies have been able to secure massive business advantages from the network effect, the use of data, the role of users and the ability of business to identify customer needs, so has the need to address taxation on remote sales become more urgent. Pillar One, with its proposal to allocate taxing rights to the market jurisdiction in circumstances where there is no physical presence, is a key part of this response. Other challenges, such as the issues in tax competition and transfer pricing, are more generic and long-standing. These are addressed by Pillar Two using broad-brush remedies against base erosion and profit shifting. They can be seen as a backstop to the more specific actions proposed by the BEPS 15 point Action Plan.

This chapter examines the response proposed by the OECD Secretariat to the challenges to the international tax framework posed by the digital economy. The challenges are very different because some, such as the allocation of taxing rights and taxable nexus, are comparatively recent challenges emerging from the enormous success of the digitalisation of the economy. As companies have been able to secure massive business advantages from the network effect, the use of data, the role of users and the ability of business to identify customer needs, so has the need to address taxation on remote sales become more urgent. Pillar One, with its proposal to allocate taxing rights to the market jurisdiction in circumstances where there is no physical presence, is a key part of this response. Other challenges, such as the issues in tax competition and transfer pricing, are more generic and long-standing. These are addressed by Pillar Two using broad-brush remedies against base erosion and profit shifting. They can be seen as a backstop to the more specific actions proposed by the BEPS 15 point Action Plan.

This chapter seeks to discredit the popular belief that blockchains will revolutionize or disrupt commerce. More specifically, it aims to clarify that blockchains as such cannot serve as a technology or ideology for the decentralization of online marketplaces. To this end, the chapter examines the interrelated concepts of decentralization, disintermediation, trustlessness, and immutability. It is necessary to understand what those terms actually mean and how they affect actual, commercial practices. The chapter commences with a broad description of blockchains and introduces the important division between public and private blockchains, to demonstrate that only the latter could potentially serve as a technology that could provide a user-friendly and secure transacting environment. It confronts the practical implications of decentralization, focusing on the fact that the absence of formalized control usually translates into an absence of formalized governance processes.