Journal of Digital Media & Policy - Regulating digital platform power, Nov 2020

This article examines which platform policies the European Commission has developed over the last couple of years and whether its policies are taking into account the differences in platform power. We first identify the main structures of platform power. Secondly, we confront the European Commission’s policies affecting media and communication platforms with those structures. Thirdly, we discuss whether what the European Commission is doing will make sense in the longer run. We end with some conclusions and recommendations for further research and policy. Our main finding is that the approach of the European Commission cannot live up to expectations, simply because it is too fragmented in terms of tackling the different dimensions of platform power together. Moreover, in the focus on detrimental effects of (some) platforms on competition, public interest issues often remain neglected.

In an internet-connected era, prominence and discoverability propose new challenges for content providers, as search and discovery functions become essential to access content online. However, general definitional confusion on these notions has contributed to a lack of understanding of what discoverability means for the online audio-visual media industry, which in turn leads to a lack of clarity over the scope, values and intentions of related regulatory proposals. This article criticizes these policy approaches and proposes a fine-tuned understanding of content discoverability that is suited to our contemporary media system and informs media and communication policy debates in this area. By contextualizing it in an industry-led governance system with opaque content-curation strategies, I apply a new analytical lens to discoverability that shows its implications for three media policy issues: namely organizations’ decisional transparency, users’ diversity of exposure and the fostering of a plurality of media independent from undue power and influence.

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 global internet-governance impossibility theorem. 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 Speech Police; the United Kingdom’s Online Harms White Paper; 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.

Digital platforms elude legal and regulatory frameworks traditionally used to address market power, speech and disinformation issues. One of the dominant policy responses to addressing these issues involves reforming competition policy to better manage digital platform markets. This case study examines how stakeholders, including tech giants, their competitors, regulators and advocacy groups, deploy competition policy to address platform power in a series of 2019–20 US congressional hearings on the subject, with implications for the wider global debate. The article traces the politics underlying these debates, which manifests in variations in stakeholders’ definitions of platform power and their proposed solutions, reflecting tensions over the role of the state in managing markets and in addressing non-economic concerns associated with digital platforms. The article concludes with a consideration of what this politics implies for policy interventions aimed at addressing platform power.

Review of: Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture, Evan Elkins (2019)

New York: New York University Press, 221 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47987-387-6, p/bk, US$29.00

Review of: Transforming Industrial Policy for the Digital Age: Production, Territories and Structural Change, PATRIZIO BIANCHI, CLEMENTE RUIZ DURÁN AND SANDRINE LABORY (eds) (2019)

Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78897-614-5, h/bk, £90.00