Public services

The pursuing of resilience and sustainability goals of communities and markets involves the digital transition of public services. Blockchain smart contracts by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) show a wide applicative potential within public services addressed to healthcare as well as agriculture and agri-food chain. Additionally, blockchain functionality could improve by the confluence of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The work, privileging the aspects of administrative law of public services such as those leading back to the principle of transparency, analyses this scenario and focuses the regulation path of smart contracts in Italy in the light of the complex and dynamic EU framework. Some debates, including the doctrinal framing, remain open. In 2021 AgID launched a blockchain infrastructure project; in 2023 AgID, according to the new Public Contracts Code, recalled smart contracts within the published technical requirements and certification methods for digital procurement platforms, while the EU activated a blockchain regulatory sandbox and recently approved the AI Act proposed in 2021. Many efforts towards a standardised regulation of smart contracts, either at EU or national level, are being profused, but they must hardly compare with the technological innovation speed and the parallel need to keep all the legal and administrative aspects under harmonic, secure, transparent and efficient control.

The advent of Uber distorts traditional legal categories and requires a rethinking of the paradigms of public intervention in the economy. This contribution analyses and compares the regulatory interventions of the Uber phenomenon, through a comparative reading of US and European systems. This contribution considers the broader regulatory perspective of the 'sharing economy' category which operates in highly regulated sectors and is often dominated by operators inspired by strong corporate values.

As part of CERIDAP's "Book Forum" initiative, a study meeting to present the book "L’intervento pubblico di contrasto della povertà"(Editoriale Scientifica, Naples, 2021), written by Prof. Claudio Franchini, was held on 27th of January 2022. The contribution aims to review the interventions of the meeting.

This essay deals with the impact of new technologies in the provision of public service. The analysis focuses specifically on urban mobility, stressing out the new mobility concept that technologies has brought and its compatibility with public service principles.

Within the development of artificial intelligence, a first sanding role is played by autonomous vehicles; these are supposed to revolutionize transports, with material economical, industrial and even social consequences. Several juridical issues are involved in this process, with particular reference to the allocation of liability, in order to provide a sufficient level of legal protection to the relevant interests at stake. This essay intends to focus the potential criminal risk related to programming, manufacturing and manning this kind of vehicles.

With judgment no. 1274 of July 3, 2020, the Regional Administrative Court of Milan has clarified that the selection, by public notice, either of public or private entities interested in providing mobility services in sharing with electric devices, does not constitute a public service activity if the Municipality has not expressed the political aim of satisfying the need of its administrators to move around the city through the use of hoverboards, segways, electric scooters and monowheels; this is due to the lack of the fundamental moment of "political engagement", which is an indefectible prerequisite to be able to integrate the figure of public service.