Digital Platform Regulation

Over the past decade the study of internet governance and platform regulation has evolved into a new, socially engaged regulatory field. This chapter introduces regulatory debates surrounding the rise of digital communications platforms and their similarities to media companies. It considers the growth of regulatory activism in response to platformisation and the ‘techlash’, disputes about platform companies’ intermediary liability, and their resistance to legal controls. The chapter also explores the distinction between regulation and governance strategies, emphasising the challenges of self-regulation. It introduces core concerns of the contributors including: how we might address platforms’ dire impact on public interest journalism; how we can develop coherent, transparent, and convergent regulatory frameworks for tackling platform power; how we might analyse and monitor platforms’ new datafied, participatory advertising operations; how we can foster local content and conceive the politics of discoverability in an age of global streaming services; why platforms might have more in common with telecommunications than media companies, and, fundamentally, why governments’ early support for platform self-regulation and governance has shifted in response to political and economic transformations.

As commercial journalism collapses around the world, the platforms’ culpability for defunding news media has attracted increasing scrutiny. Journalism’s sustainability is increasingly threatened by the Facebook and Google duopoly, which devours the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue, at a time when democratic societies desperately need reliable news and information. Thus far, policy measures to rebalance this power relationship have been limited. Moreover, policy debates focused on these issues too often elide the core root of the problem in both diminishing journalism and driving the platforms toward antisocial behavior: namely, unbridled capitalism. With this problem in mind, this essay explores more radical options toward buffering our core news and information systems from corrosive commercial logics.

The relatively short relationship between digital platforms and the news media has been characterized by constant evolution and conflict. As the economics of journalism have faltered and digital platforms have risen to become prominent gateways to the news, that relationship has increasingly caught the attention of policymakers. This chapter focuses on recent developments in three countries (Germany, France, and Australia) that have been particularly active in intervening in the relationship between digital platforms and the press. It highlights national government efforts to require platforms such as Google and Facebook to compensate news organizations for distributing their content. This chapter provides an overview of these efforts and their underlying political dynamics. It concludes with an assessment of the broader implications of the actions that these countries have taken and a consideration of future and alternative policy options.

Most experts and journalists agree on the huge importance of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (hereinafter DSA). But can the first proposal published by the EU Commission in December 2020 live up to the expectations expressed ahead? The business model of social media platforms has been criticized for years, but since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this criticism has expanded beyond a relatively small circle of experts. Lawmakers around the world have tried to push platforms to enforce applicable law and take responsibility. This contribution looks at the key obligations under the DSA and how they are monitored for compliance. It also presents the provisions for greater transparency and accountability. Finally, it looks at the possible consequences if the DSA were to come into force in its current form.

This chapter analyses examples of conflicts in standards that may illustrate the need for digital platforms to adopt a more proactive approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR). It asks what changes platform media would need to make to ‘take responsibility’ in the digital landscape., and undertaken an exploration of existing regulatory approaches and analyses of practice, to propose an enhanced vision of digital corporations’ application of CSR to benefit individuals and societies. The suggestion is that digital platforms be constructed as publishers of information, requiring them to be accountable for material carried on their sites.

This chapter offers an account of how alcohol marketers have used social media platforms over the past fifteen years, and argues that understanding the engineering, operation and consequences of platforms’ data-driven, participatory and opaque advertising model is fundamental to addressing larger questions of platform regulation in the public interest. It suggests that through the case of alcohol marketing we can understand and assess many of the novel regulatory challenges posed by the advertising model of digital platform companies. Thus, in this chapter we appraise some of the existing alcohol industry and platform approaches to self-regulation and suggest some principles for regulating marketing that is data-driven, participatory and opaque, and connect these to larger debates about the future regulation of platforms. The critical assessment of the novel ways in which platform marketing integrates participatory forms of audience engagement with the prospecting, segmentation and targeting of consumers is crucial for developing an accountable regulatory regime that allows for effective governance of the commercial activities of marketers and brands on platforms.

This chapter traces how dominant U.S. platform companies attempt to influence policy debates, focusing on (a) the policy issues they engage, (b) the policy preferences they communicate, and (c) what these communications reveal about their regulatory and platform governance philosophies. Amid calls for private–public platform oversight frameworks, these policy communications provide insight into what such co-governance regimes might look like in practice. Specifically, platforms seek partnerships extending beyond nation-state boundaries, reflecting the transnational scope of their business operations. Domestically, they call for a form of “frictionless regulation”: light and narrow regulatory oversight confined to baseline standard-setting, receptive to the private sector's ongoing feedback, and prioritizing fast responsiveness to market needs over the slow and deliberative responsiveness to the public, typical of democratic governance.

In recent years, researchers have scrutinised the power of digital platforms in the news industry. However, while digital platforms are powerful actors, there is a tendency to emphasise this power at the expense of other institutions. In this chapter we examine the critical role that government, regulatory authorities and the news media played in developing the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. We explore how long-standing relationships between sections of the media and the government, and the regulatory activism of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, influenced the final form of the Code. In doing so, we offer a nuanced account of platform power that contextualises their actions in relation to the residual institutional power of local actors.

As the Australian government has legislated for a ‘News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code’ to compel Google and Facebook to pay for news content, platform regulation in Australia has prompted a heated discussion worldwide. Questionable business practices have incited issues such as anti-competition behaviour, online harms, disinformation, algorithmic advertising, trade of data, privacy breaches and so on. Consequently, these technology tycoons are reinscribing industries and societies alike, posing a threat to digital democracy. This chapter examines how Facebook and WeChat are (or should be) regulated in Australia, the current regulatory frameworks, and the overall effectiveness of self-regulation. Through the lenses of comparative research, this study is focused on infrastructuralisation, techno-nationalism (censorship), and civil society (media diversity), to identify distinct features and common themes in platform regulation and explore possible solutions to regulating global platforms in Australia.

There are rapidly growing concerns worldwide about the impact of content aggregation and distribution through digital platforms on traditional media industries and society in general. These have given rise to policy and regulation across the social pillar, including issues of privacy, moderation, and cyberbullying; the public interest/infosphere pillar, with issues such as fake news, the democratic deficit, and the crisis in journalism; and the competition pillar, involving issues based on platform dominance in advertising markets. The cultural pillar, involving the impact of SVODs on the ability of content regulation to support local production capacity, is often bracketed out of these debates. We argue this divide is increasingly untenable due to the convergent complexities of contemporary media and communications policy and regulation. We pursue this argument by offering three issues that bring policy and regulation together across the platform-SVOD divide: digital and global players have been beyond the reach of established broadcasting regulation; the nature of the Silicon Valley playbook for disrupting media markets; and platforms and SVODs now need not only to be aggregators but also contributors to local cultures. We draw on three examples: the European Union, Canada and Australia.

In recent years, the growing popularity of services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has raised complex challenges for media policy. Established policy approaches in a range of areas including audio-visual licensing, classification, censorship, and local production support are now being disrupted as governments grapple with the “Netflix effect” and its implications for national markets and institutions. Meanwhile, consumption practices are also changing as the algorithmically curated interfaces of SVOD services invite audiences to discover content in new ways. In particular, the use of personalised recommendation and other algorithmic filtering techniques has prompted discussion of how SVODs manage the visibility of different kinds of content—and whether these discovery environments require a policy response. This chapter explores how discoverability has emerged as a topic of debate, specifically in relation to SVOD services, and how this is connected to other precedents in audio-visual law and policy such as prominence regulation. We reflect on the many tensions inherent in this area of policy—which exists at the interface of media and platform regulation—and consider some of the normative questions raised when governments intervene in audiences’ content choices.

A relatively small number of global Internet giants—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix—have come under intense and ongoing fire for precipitating a twin crisis of journalism and the media, destroying democracy, and centralizing control over the Internet. In response, a new wave of Internet regulation is now in the making in one country after another. This chapter agrees that a forceful response to the platforms is overdue but raises concerns that the case against GAFAM + has become orthodoxy, anchored in cherry-picked evidence and a tendency to see these firms as the cause of all perceived woes. I also argue that while attempts to regulate digital platforms by the standards of broadcasting regulation may be politically expedient, this approach rests on superficial analogies. It also ignores the fact that the media industries have developed in close proximity to the vastly larger telecoms, consumer electronics and banking firms since the mid-nineteenth century. The last sections of this chapter offer four principles of structural and behavioural regulation drawn from this history as guides for a new generation of internet regulation today: structural separation (break-ups), line of business restrictions (firewalls), public obligations and public alternatives.

Who should decide what content is permissible online? Platforms will always exercise some degree of discretion over content moderation, and ensuring that platforms exercise their discretionary powers responsibly is a large part of making governance legitimate. In this chapter, we argue that improving the self-regulation of internal governance practices of platforms is a critical component of any regulatory project. Our argument is that platforms must always have a role in regulating lawful speech and that regulating ordinary, lawful speech is critical to influencing cultures and addressing harm. We draw on the results of a qualitative study involving a broad group of participants who actively work to influence how platforms govern their users. We offer a simple proof in the moral responsibilities that platforms bear to address the pressing need for cultural change in violence against women—responsibilities that cannot fully be carried out or overseen by states or other external actors.

One of the paradoxes of the misinformation and ‘fake news’ debates are that they require a greater degree of trust in media, digital platforms and governments in order to combat conspiracy theories, when in fact distrust of media, digital platforms and governments is part of a wider crisis of trust in institutions and expertise. This suggests that we need a more sophisticated analysis of the politics of expertise and how they intersect with both policies towards digital platforms and shifts in the political sphere. Drawing upon the work of Thomas Piketty on shifts in electoral politics, and Pippa Norris on the rise of populism, it is argued that debates about tech policy are largely played out between educated elites from ‘liberal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ perspectives, which leaves them open to populist critique. One of the reasons why there are greater calls to regulate digital platforms is the rise of political populism, which can leave digital activists in a political bind: they favour measures to rein in the power of ‘Big Tech’ in principle, but are very wary of any measures perceived to increase the power of nation states with regards to the Internet.