Barry Appleton

This case study examines the constitutional, regulatory and operational difficulties that have attended Kenya’s three successive attempts to deploy a national digital identity system. Each generation has been challenged in the High Court, and in each case the same legal flaw has been determinative. The case asks how a state should respond when its preferred operational path has been twice declared unlawful, and a third generation of the same system is now before the courts.

Maral Niazi, Abbas Yazdinejad and Hadis Karimipour

Amendments to the Canadian Payments Act are coming into force and expanding Payments Canada membership eligibility to payment service providers (PSPs) supervised by the Bank of Canada. Yet the broader problem remains unresolved: Canada does not yet have live Real-Time Rail (RTR) and is the only G7 country without a real-time payments system. The primary goal of this case study is to examine whether broadening eligibility is enough.

Dmytro Chumachenko

Launched in 2020, Diia, Ukraine’s “state-in-a-smartphone,” was serving about 22 million users and more than 140 services by 2025. However, this wartime success now collides with the EU Data Act, which requires cloud contracts to allow workload switching. If Diia’s cloud architecture cannot meet these portability and fee-free switching requirements, the country risks turning one of its flagship digital achievements from the accession era into evidence of non-compliance with the European Union’s digital rulebook.

Lex Zard

Since Spring 2021, authorities in the United Kingdom have been facing a seemingly intractable challenge: Google’s Privacy Sandbox. Without such privacy initiatives, people’s data is extracted in ways that are harmful to them and to societies at large. Yet the paradox of Google’s initiative is that, by adopting privacy measures, the Privacy Sandbox can reinforce Google’s control over online advertising. UK authorities are facing the dilemma of what kind of privacy measures they can mandate without harming competition.

Ryan Williams

This case examines the policy dilemma facing Canadian regulators as they finalize the implementation framework for consumer-directed banking, commonly referred to as open banking. While Parliament has passed legislation and the government has initiated development, key decisions remain unresolved. The case situates this decision within the context of Canada’s highly concentrated banking sector, where just six banks control the majority of financial assets.