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Regulating digital platform power
  • ISSN: 2516-3523
  • E-ISSN: 2516-3531

Abstract

Economist Dani Rodrik argues that global economic governance is characterized by a trilemma: ‘we cannot have hyperglobalization, democracy, and national self-determination all at once. We can have at most two out of three’. This trilemma can also be applied to internet governance and global platform governance as a corollary . This trilemma, which emphasizes who sets the rules and the degree of democratic accountability they face, offers us a way to evaluate online content-regulation proposals. This article applies this framework to four prominent platform-governance proposals: Facebook’s proposal for a global ‘Oversight Board’; David Kaye’s book ; the United Kingdom’s ; and French president Emmanuel Macron’s speech to the 2018 Internet Governance Forum. Of the four, only Macron’s framework offers a pathway to reconciling democratic accountability with the existence of different legitimate views on how content should be regulated.

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2020-11-01
2024-04-25
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Global platform governance and the internet-governance impossibility theorem
Journal of Digital Media & Policy 11, 321 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00028_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jdmp_00028_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jdmp_00028_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): content moderation; global governance; information sovereignty; internet governance; platform governance; structural power

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