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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
We once thought of cyberspace as a borderless world. As the internet has become increasingly platformized, with a small number of technology giants that dominate the global digital economy, concerns about information monopolies, hateful online content, and the impact on media content creators and creative industries have become more marked. Consequently governments, politicians, and civil society are questioning how digital platforms can or should be regulated. In this up-to-the-minute study, Terry Flew engages with important questions surrounding platform regulation. Starting from the premise that governance is an inherent feature of digital platforms, he argues that the challenge is to develop the best frameworks for balancing external regulatory oversight with the internal governance practices of platform companies. The intersection of media policy, information policy, and economic policy is an important element of policy frameworks, as national authorities increasingly seek to engage with the power of global digital platforms. Lively and accessible, Regulating Platforms is a go-to text for students and scholars of media and communication.
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Seitenzahl: 506
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Acknowledgements
Figures
Tables
1 The End of the Libertarian Internet
Revisiting the Californian Ideology
The Three Is: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions
Framing the Internet and Digital Platforms
Free Minds and Free Markets
The New Economy
Freedom and Government
The Open Internet and Romanticism
Openness as Public Policy: Safe Harbour and the Communications Decency Act 1996
The Changing Internet Landscape
From Innovation to Monopoly: The End of the Fifth Long Wave
Platformization of the Internet
Digital Platforms as Media Companies?
Digital Platforms and Populist Politics
Renewed Regulatory Activism
Conclusion
Notes
2 The Platformization of Communications Media
The Platformized Internet
What Is a Platform?
The Evolution of Digital Platforms
Types of Digital Platforms and Digital Platform Companies
Platform Economics and Multisided Markets
Platforms and Infrastructures
Conclusion
3 Issues of Concern
Introduction: Beyond the Techlash
Privacy and Security
Data
Algorithms
Disinformation and Fake News
Hate Speech and Online Abuse
Impact on Media and Creative Industries
Information Monopolies
Conclusion
Notes
4 Digital Platforms and Communications Policy
Introduction
Law, Policy, and Regulation: Three Frames of Communications Policy
National Communications Policy in the Twentieth Century
The Three Is of Communication Policy: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Institutions and the New Institutionalism
Ideas and Communication Policy
Interests and Public Policy: Pluralist, Elite, and Class Perspectives
The Three Is in Action: Communications Policy in the Age of the Internet
Conclusion
Notes
5 Platform Regulation and Governance
Introduction: The Shifting Shape of Platform Governance
The Governance Revolution
The Platform Governance Triangle
Regulatory Case Studies
NetzDG Law (Germany)
General Data Protection Regulation (European Union)
News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code (Australia)
The Facebook Oversight Board (Global)
The Christchurch Call (New Zealand/International)
Contract for the Web (Global)
Classifying Regulatory Responses to Digital Platform Power
Platform Governance or Platform Regulation?
Conclusion
Notes
6 The Chinese Internet and the Future of Global Internet Governance
Introduction: Liberal Institutionalism and Global Internet Governance
Global Internet Governance under US Leadership
The Internet in China
Early Internet Development in China: Leapfrogging the Information Age
Political Economy of China’s Digital Platform Giants
Distinctive Features of the ‘Chinese Internet’ Model
Fragmented Internet Governance and the Risk of a Global Splinternet
Conclusion
Notes
7 Platform Power and the Future of Internet Policy
Powerful Platforms
The Regulatory Turn and the Return of State Actors
Beyond the Platformized Internet
Enhancing Competition in Digital Markets
Content Regulation and Online Harms
Who Regulates?
Harmful and Illegal Content
Internet Regulation and Media and Communications Policy
Platforms as Intermediaries or as Publishers?
Differentiating Types of Platforms
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Competition, Content, and Data: Three Distinct Points of Platform Regulation
Is Internet Governance Possible?
The Politics of Platform Regulation
Reappraising Regulators
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Domains of Circulation and Platform Types. Source: Langley and Leyshon, 2017, p....
Table 2.2
Three Taxonomies of Digital Platforms. Created by author.
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Classification of Six Case Studies of Digital Platform Regulation. Created by au...
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
International Inquiries and Reviews of Digital Platforms up to August 2020. Sour...
Table 7.2
Variables Affecting Platform Governance. Source: Owen, 2019, p. 5.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 1.1
Ideas, Interests, and Institutions. Created by author.
Figure 1.2
Trajectory of a Technological Innovation. Source: Perez, 2010, p. 187.
Figure 1.3
The Growth of the GAFAM in the 2010s. Source: Statista, 2019. Licensed under CC ...
Figure 2.1
Platforms as a Layer of Applications and Content. Source: Author.
Figure 2.2
Platform Business Models Based on Direct and Indirect Network Effects. Source: N...
Figure 2.3
Digital Platforms and their Relationships in Media Businesses. Source: Australia...
Figure 2.4
Interactions of Digital Platforms with their Users. Source: Australian Competiti...
Figure 3.1
Deanonymized User Data. Source: Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, ...
Figure 3.2
Trust in Media across 26 Countries. Source: Edelman Data & Intelligence, 202...
Figure 3.3
Declining Trust in Newspapers and TV News in the United States. Source: Zuckerma...
Figure 3.4
Continuum of Discriminatory and Hateful Speech. Source: Adapted from Cortese, 20...
Figure 3.5
Decline in Journalism Employment in the United States, 2008–18. Sources: ...
Figure 4.1
Elements of a National Communications Policy. Source: Van Cuilenberg and McQuail...
Figure 5.1
The Platform Governance Triangle. Source: Gorwa, 2019a. Licensed under CC BY 3.0...
Figure 6.1
Number of Patents Filed for Different Offices by Earliest Priority Date, 1970...
Figure 6.2
Top Patent Offices by Number of Applications for Different AI Techniques, and Nu...
Figure 7.1
The New Free Speech Triangle. Source: Balkin, 2018, p. 2014.
Figure 7.2
European Union Regulatory Typology of Online Services. Source: European Commissi...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Regulating Platforms
terry flew
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Terry Flew 2021
The right of Terry Flew to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3707-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3708-2(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940656
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Preface
The primary aim of Regulating Platforms is twofold. First, the book aims to provide an overview of the issues that are currently arising, as governments throughout the world address the social, economic, political, and cultural implications of digital platforms and their power to shape online interactions at a time when most of the world’s population relies on the internet more than ever before. The book asks practical questions such as how to define platforms and delineate their different types, what is the mixture of issues of concern about the power of digital platforms, and what can be learnt from the initiatives that both state and non-state actors – including the digital platform companies themselves and the third-party regulators they have summoned into existence – have thrown at the growing array of policymakers, politicians, regulators, corporate advisors, academics, and activists engaged with these issues.
The book also has a second, more normative focus. It asks the question: why now? After a period of over two decades of broad consensus, at least in the western capitalist world, that the best approach to the internet that policymakers could take was to do very little, why did internet governance and regulation surge onto the global agenda in the mid-2010s, and why has it remained there ever since? We are coming to the end of a long period of ‘soft globalism’ and polycentric governance of the internet at the international level, a period during which the prevailing view was that the best decisions were those made by ‘rough consensus’ in multistakeholder forums where governments were a relatively minor player. Why did we see the resurgence of tech nationalism? Why did governments start to ban the platforms of other countries, triggering concerns about a global ‘splinternet’?
It is not hard to see when the sea change in attitudes towards the regulation of online environments happened. In the United States, it can be located in the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump presidency and in the range of concerns that the 2016 presidential election raised, from the circulation of fake news on social media platforms to allegations of electoral interference by foreign powers. The European Union chose to act on widespread concerns about the misuse of personal data online; the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted in 2016 and came into law in 2018, setting rules about how digital platforms and other online entities could make use of material provided by online ‘data subjects’. The GDPR demonstrated that the online environment, long held to constitute a realm beyond the territorial sovereignty and policy knowledge of governments, could in principle be regulated, and that digital tech giants would respond appropriately to the regulation of their activities by sovereign political entities. The GDPR preceded the Cambridge Analytica scandal – that is, the revelations of whistleblower Christopher Wylie to the Guardian’s journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in 2018, about how data gathered through Facebook were onsold to political campaigns such as the Vote Leave group in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the Trump campaign in the United States. Even so, the scandal threw into very sharp relief a range of concerns that had been simmering about the power of digital platforms and the possibilities of misuing it. Discussion of a ‘global techlash’ and the rise of the FAANG or FAMGA – acronyms for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google or, in a different version, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – became commonplace.
The argument of this book is that the push for greater internet regulation is integrally related to the platformization of the internet – that is, the process through which online interactions and engagements are increasingly made to take place on a relatively small number of digital platforms. Moreover, as the platform business model enables significant competitive advantages to accrue to dominant companies through first-mover advantages, lock-ins, and network effects, the companies that own these online spaces acquire monopolistic and oligopolistic economic power. Such derives from access to ever-growing bodies of user data that allow for behavioural targeting across multisided markets. This power extends not only over consumers but over other businesses as well, both through dominance of digital advertising and through the terms of trade that these giants can impose on digital content providers in the news media, entertainment, and other creative industries. With such power, however, comes considerable social responsibility, as the dominant companies increasingly perform a gatekeeping function over digital communications and play an outsized role in political processes around the world. Hence it becomes imperative that they set guidelines and moderate online speech across issues such as hate speech and online abuse, or disinformation and fake news. But these companies were strongly imbued with the Silicon Valley ethos of maximizing free speech rights and user engagement: this was both their business model and their underlying philosophy. In consequence, they have frequently been uncomfortable with managing online interactions in ways that satisfy the concerns of citizens, politicians, other stakeholders in their businesses, and the public interest.
A historical typology informs the book: in this typology, the evolution of the internet unfolds in three stages. The first stage, which can be broadly dated roughly from 1990 to 2005, is that of the open internet or libertarian internet, as we may call it. It was strongly infused by the Californian ideology – which is summed up in the slogan ‘free minds and free markets’ – as well as by deregulatory economics and countercultural idealism. The idea was that governments can and should be largely kept at bay in matters of regulating the internet, on the grounds that the spontaneous ordering introduced by global netizens would promote a liberal order underpinned by continuous waves of technological innovation.
The second stage, from 2006 to the present, is that of the platformized internet. The rise of Web 2.0 brought together two significant insights: most internet users preferred environments that were managed and curated by others; and such environments enabled online interaction by simplifying processes of accessing content or using devices. As part of this welcome simplification, every online interaction produced a data trail that was potentially open to providing useful insights, which could in turn inform further economic transactions. This was the era of gestation of big tech and the companies that dominate digital communications today. Critics came to label it ‘digital capitalism’, ‘platform capitalism’, and ‘surveillance capitalism’. It has seen growing demands for antitrust action against the tech giants, calls for greater regulation of online activity in order to reduce social harms, and concerns that the digital sorting and reshaping of communities could promote political polarization and a ‘post-truth’ society.
The argument of this book is that we are now entering into a third phase of the internet’s evolution, namely that of the regulated internet. One of the questions I raise concerns the relationship between platform regulation and platform governance. One version is that regulation characterized twentieth-century communications and media policy, and especially nation-state agencies, whereas governance is a broader term that encompasses multiple stakeholders, policy innovation, and approaches derived from behavioural economics and nudge theories. Drawing upon six case studies that have operated at national, regional, and global levels, I critique this argument, proposing instead that the distinction is not so much between regulation and governance as it is between regulations that are applied by external agencies and have some form of negative sanction attached to breaking laws, and regulations that largely work upon implicit understandings of appropriate platform conduct and the promise of better corporate behaviour. The field is rendered more complex by the fact that governance is an inherent feature of platforms themselves, as they manage multiple stakeholders in diverse market environments that have high levels of public visibility around their decisions. This book argues (1) that public opinion and the role played by governments that seek to represent it push towards greater external regulation of digital platforms, and (2) that nation states are becoming increasingly important actors in shaping online environments. At the same time, many regulatory models are hybrids of nation-state regulation, co-regulation, and self-regulation. This is a space with high levels of innovation when it comes to types of regulatory approaches (the Facebook Oversight Board is a recent example) and with higher levels of civil society engagement, public interest, and media reportage than found in other industry sectors.
These developments are conceptualized in the book around the proposition that the development of digital technologies generally and of digital platforms specifically can be framed as arising at the intersection of ideas, interests, and institutions. Ideas refers to the dominant ways of thinking about material objects and relationships at any given time, but also to the ideas that challenge and compete with those dominant ways of thinking or ‘mental maps’, as they are sometimes called (Denzau and North, 1994). Interests consist of those entities that seek to advance their own power individually or collectively, in the economic, political, and cultural spheres. Digital platform companies themselves are clearly ‘interests’ in this special usage, and so are other businesses that have relationships with them (news media, entertainment, advertising, etc.), as well as organizations that represent conflicting or competing interests: trade unions, advocacy groups, consumer organizations, and non-government organizations (NGOs) generally. Institutions are those organizational arenas that have responsibility for governing and regulating digital platforms for particular outcomes. Through them the interplay of ideas and interests is played out and collective decision-making occurs – at local, national, regional and supranational levels.
What we see from this angle is a mismatch between the rise of digital platform companies as dominant players in the global economy and de facto gatekeepers of digital interactions on the one hand, and the ideas and institutions that underpin platform regulation on the other. Many of the ideas that inform this space and the institutions established for its governance remain tied to the decentralized world of the open internet on which they were premised. In this world, nation states should not govern the digital realm because no one needs to govern it. That was the ideal of spontaneous ordering promised by the libertarian internet. As a result, we come across increasing numbers of instances where nation states that attempt to regulate competition, content, data, and other aspects of the digital environment find their legitimacy in doing so repeatedly challenged, both by the interested companies themselves, which tend to operate globally rather than nationally, and by civil society organizations. At the heart of debates along this line is the question whether those who interact with digital platforms are best understood as national citizens or as global netizens.
I owe a key conceptual debt to the work of Michel Foucault. This book is not a Foucauldian analysis of the internet and digital platforms. It does, however, pick up on two key insights from Foucault. The first concerns the nature of power. I argue here that platform power exists, but does not operate primarily through the ability of digital companies to make people do things that they would not otherwise do. In that respect, my view here differs from the critique offered in the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma (Orlowski, 2020), which draws a direct link between behavioural targeting through algorithmic manipulations of user data and the turn to online filter bubbles and political extremism. This could be described as evidence of akrasia – the kind of weakness that makes one act against one’s better judgement.
While the algorithmic manipulation of users through access to online data about them is possible – this is the basis of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – the argument of this book is that a comprehensive treatment of digital platform power needs to focus on the capacity of major platforms to shape the economic, political, and communications environments in which they operate. They can shape digital markets, political processes, and the online public sphere. This capacity may or may not be exercised, but it demonstrably exerts a strong influence on other players in the environment, from media companies to political activists and from politicians and political parties to regulators and governments. When, in February 2021, Facebook withdrew the access of Australian news media sites to its global news feed, as part of a bargaining strategy designed to influence the federal government’s proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, it made explicit forms of power that had long been tacit in the media environment. Similarly, the whole debate as to whether platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would act upon false claims and misinformation emanating from Donald Trump and his supporters drew attention to the amount of power of this sort they held within their organizations: power not framed by constitutions, laws, or legislators but contained by their own terms of service as interpreted by themselves. This is a form of power quite different from that of big corporations, as it is sui generis power, which constitutes a genuine challenge to other kinds of political authority. This is a challenge that, as many commentators have noted, is unprecedented among media industries but has a historical analogue (and to that extent a precedent) in the rise of the giant industrial trusts of the early twentieth century. Interestingly, the populist challenge to the power of big tech has played out particularly strongly in the United States, where it is one of the very few policy issues that can cross the Republican–Democrat partisan divide.
The responses to this concentrated economic, political, and communications power have been many and varied. A recurrent issue in these debates concerns the global nature of digital platforms and whether nation states have the inclination or the capacity to constitute forms of countervailing regulatory power. It is also the case that there are different national trajectories that have shaped the evolution of the internet in different parts of the world, ranging from the Californian ideology of the early Silicon Valley culture (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996) to the authoritarian statism and techno-nationalism that have shaped the Chinese internet. At the same time, not accepting this binary opposition, leaders such as Emanuel Macron called for a ‘third way’ of regulating the internet (Macron, 2018). The regulatory activism of the European Union shows us the gist of these initiatives in policies such as the GDPR and the proposed Digital Services Act. But this move has caused concerns about the rise of a global ‘splinternet’ (Lemley, 2021), as different national and regional models of internet governance develop institutional path dependence and the relatively weak and fragmented institutions of global internet governance show little capacity to broker a new framework for shared global governance in an era when nation states are gaining ascendancy.
There are strong reasons to believe that the capacity of nation states to regulate global digital platforms has been systematically underestimated; and the idea that state regulation is inherently impossible is not an empirical reality as much as an ideology that serves dominant interests. One of the important consequences of the platformization of the internet is that it has revealed the extent to which content on digital platforms is already moderated, curated, managed, and governed in various ways. This discovery has shifted the focus from whether online content can be regulated to who should regulate it and what forms of accountability and transparency should be set in place for content moderation decisions. Moreover, the demand to use antitrust laws to ‘break up big tech’ (Warren, 2019) can be seen as being as much about promoting competitive markets as it is about regulating digital capitalism. Indeed, some of the most vocal supporters of antitrust measures are also strong champions of free market capitalism and argue that information monopolies are stifling economic growth and innovation (Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, 2019). This has prompted critics on the left to argue that antitrust laws do not go far enough in breaking up the architecture of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Deibert, 2020).
The book concludes with a discussion of the practicalities of platform regulation and of some wider political issues that arise from the turn to a ‘legitimacy’ discourse – that is, one where the stress is on who makes decisions on what basis and whether the private and public actors can be trusted by the citizenry (Bowers and Zittrain, 2020). There are differences between policies and regulations that aim to enhance competition in digital markets and policies and regulations that aim to address online harms and online content. A series of substantive regulatory questions arises. One can ask whether the focus is on illegal or potentially harmful content (and who decides what is ‘potentially harmful’); how well these regulations sit within a revised communications and media policy programme; whether platforms begin to resemble publishers in legal terms; to what extent regulations apply primarily to what the European Union now calls ‘very large online platforms’ (VLOPs); and the issue of proportionality in regulatory burden.
I argue in the Conclusion that platform regulation can been seen, not as the state imposing its will upon digital netizens, but rather as a series of steps to democratize decision-making about digital platforms and digital futures. There are of course inherent risks: governments can overreach in their attempt to control the information for their own ends; alternatively, regulation may end up taking a largely symbolic form – appearing to address problems when in reality it has no ‘teeth’. Like many issues in the policy domain today, the politics of platform regulation does not align neatly with a left–right political split. Conservatives grapple with the division between a pro-market, pro-globalization wing and a more populist and nationalist wing, which is more likely to attempt to regulate digital platforms, whereas the left is divided into a globally minded cosmopolitan wing, which looks upon the state as a threat to freedom of speech, and a ‘democratic nationalist’ wing – so labelled by Brian Loader (2021) – which wants to make corporate power more accountable at home, in order to address the concerns of a disenfranchised citizenry. It must be said that, although digital platform regulation presents many complexities and challenges, these are not inherently greater than those associated with other industries that deal with intangible global commodities, for instance banking and finance. Part of the issue is around re-establishing public confidence in the regulatory state and in ideas about the public interest, at a time when digital platforms are increasingly promoting themselves as representing the polity more effectively than do its elected representatives.
Acknowledgements
This book has been the product of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, ‘The Platform Governance Project: Rethinking Internet Regulation as Media Policy’ (DP190100222). I would like to thank the ARC for their support, and acknowledge my co-investigators on that project: Fiona Martin, Nicolas Suzor, Tim Dwyer, Philip Napoli, and Josef Trappel. I would also like to acknowledge those who have offered research assistance during the project: Rosalie Gillett, Chunmeizi Su, Lucy Sunman, Yuan Jiang, Callum McWaters, and Katherine Kirkwood.
This book has been written in two institutional environments. At the Queensland University of Technology I benefited from the input of John Banks, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Stuart Cunningham, Uwe Dulleck, Joanne Gray, Donna Hancox, Stephen Harrington, Greg Hearn, Ozan Isler, Brendan Keogh, Amanda Lotz, Kylie Pappalardo, Michael Rosemann, Rebekah Russell-Bennett, Mark Ryan, Kevin Sanson, Mandy Thomas, and Aljosha Karim Schapals. In the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, which I joined as Professor of Digital Communications and Culture in 2021, I was able to present the findings of the book to the Digital Cultures Research Cluster, where the overall argument received valuable feedback. My thanks go to Olga Boichok, Benedetta Brevini, Marcus Carter, Chris Chesher, Mitchell Hobbs, Justine Humphry, Jonathon Hutchinson, Mark Johnson, Catharine Lumby, Alana Mann, Penny O’Donnell, and Margaret van Heekeren.
At Polity, I wish to thank Mary Savigar for her commitment throughout this project and Stephanie Homer for her support in the later stages of the book. I also benefited from the observations of two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript: this is a better book for their insights. I would also like to thank Manuela Tecusan for her meticulous copy-editing of the draft manuscript.
Much of the book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected my ability to present ideas to other researchers. Yet I was lucky enough to benefit from numerous conversations. Among those whom I wish to thank for these important contributions to the book are Peng Hwa Ang, Sandra Braman, David Craig, Mark Deuze, Claes de Vreese, Lelia Green, Larry Gross, Jennifer Holt, Minna Horowitz, Petros Iosifidis, Amy Jordan, Ramon Lobato, Graham Murdock, Sora Park, Pawel Popiel, Philip Schlesinger, Julian Thomas, Rod Tiffen, Derek Wilding, and Dwayne Winseck.
Aspects of the book’s main arguments have been presented to the Media Industries Conference in London in 2018, the International Association for Media and Communications (IAMCR) conference in Madrid in 2019, and two International Communications Association (ICA) conferences, in 2020 and 2021 (both virtual). I have also presented versions of the book’s arguments, in both in-person and virtual forums, to the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Southern California; the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University; the Communications University of China; Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Xiamen University; Zhejiang University; Moscow State University; and the Swinburne University of Technology.
I would like to acknowledge the encouragement of my wife, Sandra Phillips, and her generosity and support throughout the writing process. As a proud Wakka Wakka and Gooreng Gooreng First Nations Australian woman who works in a predominantly white academy, and as the mother of three sons whom she brought up as a sole parent while pursuing a publishing, then academic career, Sandra has taught me that my privileged status in the global academy has institutional underpinnings that are easy for people like myself to take for granted. She has also reminded me of the importance of an orientation to justice in my research and scholarship.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my daughter, Charlotte, and to the coming generation of students and researchers. Having lived their childhoods in the big shadow of digital platforms and social media, they come into the landscape traversed in this book with their eyes wide open. May they be the agents of transformative change.
Figures
1.1. Ideas, Interests, and Institutions
1.2. Trajectory of a Technological Innovation
1.3. The Growth of the GAFAM in the 2010s
2.1. Platforms as a Layer of Applications and Content
2.2. Platform Business Models Based on Direct and Indirect Network Effects
2.3. Digital Platforms and their Relationships in Media Businesses
2.4. Interactions of Digital Platforms with their Users
3.1. Deanonymized User Data
3.2. Trust in Media across 26 Countries
3.3. Declining Trust in Newspapers and TV News in the United States
3.4. Continuum of Discriminatory and Hateful Speech
3.5. Decline in Journalism Employment in the United States, 2008–18
4.1. Elements of a National Communications Policy
5.1. The Platform Governance Triangle
6.1. Number of Patents Filed for Different Offices by Earliest Priority Date, 1970–2014
6.2. Top Patent Offices by Number of Applications for Different AI Techniques, and Number of Scientific Publications for Different AI Techniques
7.1. The New Free Speech Triangle
7.2. European Union Regulatory Typology of Online Services
Tables
2.1. Domains of Circulation and Platform Types
2.2. Three Taxonomies of Digital Platforms
5.1. Classification of Six Case Studies of Digital Platform Regulation
7.1. International Inquiries and Reviews of Digital Platforms since August 2020
7.2. Variables Affecting Platform Governance
1The End of the Libertarian Internet
Revisiting the Californian Ideology
In his three-part documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, the filmmaker Adam Curtis developed an account of the influence of libertarian ideas on both US public policy and US digital culture (Curtis, 2011). Curtis points out that the objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand has been one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, and that one of the places where her works have been particularly influential was among the emerging class of computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors in the Palo Alto region of California, south of San Francisco. In this region, Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged was the second bestseller, after the Bible. Palo Alto was going to be at the heart of what we now know as Silicon Valley: a cluster of technological corporations established within proximity of Stanford University that include Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal, Hewlett-Packard, and many others (Porter, 1998).
Rand’s appeal to the emergent entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, argued Curtis, was her commitment to a radical individualism and to the proposition that personal prosperity comes – and can only come – from free individuals who apply their talents and accumulate wealth, while they are protected by constitutionally guaranteed property rights – including the right to control their own intellectual property. In her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the architect-hero John Galt proclaims: ‘Just as man cannot exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right to property’ (Rand quoted in Streeter, 2011, p. 140).
The influence of Randian ideas on the development of internet industries and cultures is an important one. It is a marker of the degree to which the internet developed in the double context of a capitalist economy and a liberal ideology, strongly stressing the role of the individual entrepreneur as the wellspring of economic progress. From this perspective, various forms of public interest regulation were seen as inhibitors to innovation; and it was through innovation rather than through welfare or regulation that all would ultimately benefit from the trickle-down effect. The period from 1980 to the present has been described – although not without contention (Flew, 2014b) – as an era of neoliberalism, characterized by ‘new political, economic and social arrangements within society that emphasize market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility’ (Springer et al., 2016, p. 2). Critics of internet policies during the 1990s such as Robert McChesney argued that the deregulatory policies of the period rested upon a particular mythology of the free market as ‘the most rational, fair, and democratic regulatory mechanism ever known to humanity … No debate is necessary to establish the market as the reigning regulatory mechanism, because the market naturally assumes that role unless the government intervenes and prevents the market from working its magic’ (McChesney, 1999, p. 136).
At one level, it is not surprising that powerful interests would advocate for minimal government controls. Economic power correlates with political power and the power to shape public ideas, and the period from the 1990s to the present day saw Apple, Alphabet (the name of Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and other information and communication technology (ICT) companies become the world’s most powerful brands and most highly capitalized organizations. But I would argue that it is insufficient to see the discourse of what I will term the libertarian internetsimply as the ideological manifestation of the rising power of digital technology companies – ‘big tech’, as they came to be referred to by their critics, whose voices have grown far more prominent in the 2020s (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Keen, 2018; Orlowski, 2020; Teachout, 2020; Warren, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). At the same time, as I will explain below, libertarian ideas developed alongside a complementary communitarianism and was accompanied by the idea that the digital abundance that new technologies afford can create a new age of sharing and a new form of gift economy – one that maybe transcends the old world of proprietary systems and intellectual property (Barlow, 1996b; Rheingold, 1994).
The Three Is: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions
In this book I develop the proposition that the social and economic expansion of digital technology in general and of digital platforms in particular can be understood as occurring at the intersection of three elements (see Figure 1.1):
Figure 1.1 Ideas, Interests, and Institutions. Created by author.
(1)
ideas
: ways of thinking about material objects and relationships that rise to prominence and gain general social acceptance but are challenged by other competing ideas;
(2)
interests
: institutions and organizations that seek to advance their individual or collective social power in the economic, political, and cultural spheres;
(3)
institutions
: organizational forms that both govern and regulate social, economic, and political relations and through which collective decision-making occurs.
I have noted that libertarian ideas strongly influenced the internet’s early history. No less significant was the influence of countercultural ideas and digital utopianism on the development of the information technology industry, which has been noted by authors such as Fred Turner (Lusoli and Turner, 2021; Turner, 2006), Tom Streeter (2011), and Manuel Castells (2001). The distinctive culture of Silicon Valley produced unusual affinities between ‘hippies’ and ‘suits’, tech entrepreneurs and digital communitarians, and scientists and hackers. This phenomenon had its roots in the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s associated with the New Left (Castells, 2001; Hafner and Lyon, 1998; Turner, 2006).
For ideas to have a lasting influence, they need to connect to other elements. This pertains to what the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault described as the materiality of discourses and the mutually constitutive relationship between institutional forms and discursive practices. For Foucault, discourses are not simply the words we use to describe things. Rather they have what he called ‘positivity’: an ability to shape social reality and the way it is understood. His historical interest was in ‘the positivity of discourses, their conditions of existence, the systems which regulate their emergence, functioning and transformation’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 69). This is not to say that everything is simply discourse, or that reality is subsumed to systems of representation. But it is to recognize that the relationship between discourses and other practices is complex and shifting. The rise of particular discourses to dominance over others is integrally connected to their capacity to be adopted within, and to be shaped by, powerful social institutions. At the same time, the way individuals conduct themselves within institutions and the ways in which those institutions in turn seek to shape their external environment are discursively framed. Organizational theorists have observed that institutions have not only a regulative function – they set rules, laws, sanctions, and so on – but also a normative and a cultural–cognitive function, insofar as they provide frameworks of moral governance, symbolic representations, and systems of belief that offer individuals shared frameworks for producing meaning (Scott, 2014). In his analysis of Foucault’s work on discourses, Gilles Deleuze observed that ‘any institution implies the existence of statements such as a constitution, a charter, contracts, registrations and enrolments. Conversely, statements refer back to an institutional milieu which is necessary for the formation both of the objects which arise in such examples of the statement and of the subject who speaks from this position’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 9).
This focus upon ideas and how they generate discourses allows us to capture the significance of what otherwise looks like overblown rhetorical flourishes of the early years of the internet. In their cyber Magna Carta, as they referred to their work, Dyson et al. (1994) associated the internet with the ‘overthrow of matter’ and with the death of mass culture and bureaucratic organization. In the following year, Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the MIT Media Lab, argued that ‘[c]omputing is not about computing any more. It is about living’ (Negroponte, 1995, p. 6). In a highly influential account of the development of the MIT Media Lab, Stewart Brand (1987, p. 255) observed: ‘Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick’. When the computer scientist Vinton Cerf, ‘the father of the internet’, was offered a position by Google, he chose for himself the title of ‘chief internet evangelist’ (Flew, 2014a). John Brockman spoke of a community of ‘digerati’ who ‘evangelize, connect people, adapt quickly’ (Brockman, 1996, p. xxvii), while Dyson et al. (1994) associated the internet with an ‘accelerating demassification [that] creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom’.
Many of these propositions are pro-capitalist, and yet curiously anti-corporate. This was a particular form of capitalism – Randian capitalism, perhaps – which stressed the power of the individual rather than of the corporation. No less a figure than President Ronald Reagan, in the 1985 presidential address that followed his re-election, observed: ‘We have lived through the age of big industry and the age of the giant corporation. But I believe that this is the age of the entrepreneur’ (Reagan, quoted in Streeter, 2011, p. 69). From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, the rebel, the disruptor remains a central figure in Silicon Valley culture. The work of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter was highly influential in this respect, as it identified capitalism as a complex evolutionary system, characterized by conflict and contradiction and by ‘gales of creative destruction’ (McCraw, 2007). Schumpeter himself was described as a ‘bourgeois Marxist’ (Catephores, 1994) and his account of the long waves of capitalist development was influential, as it placed innovation and entrepreneurship at the dynamic centre of capitalist economies and focused upon the entrepreneur as disruptor of the established institutional order.
In an important early critique of such arguments, Barbrook and Cameron referred to ‘the Californian ideology’, which gave ‘a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy’ (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996, p. 44) and accommodated a curious mix of free market economics and countercultural radicalism. It did so by making room for an opposition between newly empowered individual users of technology and the state, while downplaying the extent to which the internet itself was the byproduct of heavy investments in communications infrastructure led by the US Department of Defence (Mazzucato, 2015). According to Barbrook and Cameron (1995, p. 46), the core of the Californian ideology consisted of the propositions that ‘information technologies … empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state’ and that ‘attempts to interfere with the emergent properties of technological and economic forces, particularly by the government, merely rebound on those who are foolish enough to defy the primary laws of nature’.
But the influence of the ideas described above was never simply ideological. They were articulated to an emergent set of economic interests, notably those of the digital technology corporations that would come to be the dominant players – first in US capitalism, then globally. This was not necessarily apparent in the early years of the internet. Academics and activists argued that the tendency of digitally networked technologies was to make access to content free, open, non-proprietorial, and shareable (Barlow, 1996b). There was the opportunity, as John Perry Barlow put it, to free ‘the economy of mind’ not only from the distributional constraints of physical form, but from the sociolegal constraints of property.
The dot.com crash of 2001 resulted from the proliferation of web-based businesses that offered products and services in new ways but lacked an underlying business model. This situation led to the formation of a speculative bubble, not backed by solid capital accumulation strategies. Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller have observed that it was the successful digital platform companies that confronted and resolved the question of ‘how to make money from information on a system designed to freely exchange information’ (Mansell and Steinmueller, 2020, p. 132). The key innovations in this respect revolved around platforms using data, algorithms, and machine learning in order to better understand their users, then onselling this information in order to sell advertising that would be more targeted than traditional approaches. It was ‘from this key insight [that] a cascade of complementary innovations followed’, all designed ‘to monetise user data and observational data about users – the process now referred to as datafication’ (p. 133). Shoshanna Zuboff (2019) has argued that it was the capacity to monetize search that made Google the first truly successful data-driven online business and the paradigm of what she termed ‘surveillance capitalism’.
Ideas associated with what I have labelled ‘the libertarian internet’ also came to have a strong influence upon the institutions of government. This was most apparent with the passing, in the 1990s and the decade 2000–10, of communications legislation that identified digital platforms as communications intermediaries rather than as companies that provided advertiser-supported digital content, and gave them legal protections from content hosted on their sites that differentiated them from publishers and media companies. This focus upon speech rather than media would strongly shape the evolution of digital platforms, as it made a strong case for nation states to remain ‘hands off’ where the governance of digital platforms was concerned. This continued to be the case even when issues surrounding the power of platform companies and the wilful misuse of the platforms became increasingly apparent.
Framing the Internet and Digital Platforms
Five elements can be identified as shaping the development of the internet in its first years, from the early 1990s until around 2005, that continue to frame our understanding of digital platforms and of the questions surrounding their governance and regulation: the influence of free market economics; theories of the ‘new economy’ and knowledge-based systems; the primacy of freedom of speech; communitarianism; and romanticism and the counterculture.
Free Minds and Free Markets
There was a strong consensus in the early years of the internet that its development should be driven by a market-led model and that the role of the government should be minimized. The digital revolution, with its ‘crucial left-right fusion of free minds and free markets’, as Louis Rossetto (1966), the founding editor of WIRED magazine, described it, was a critical driver of thought and policy. This was so in spite of the fact that vital parts of the internet’s infrastructure – such as ARPANET – were largely funded by the US government, or that the World Wide Web was first developed by computer scientists at the government-funded Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) (Castells, 2001; Mazzucato, 2015).
Beyond the level of pronouncements, such ideas had a substantive impact upon key areas of public policy. The Telecommunications Act 1996, which aimed to reduce legislative barriers to technological convergence, was passed by the US Congress in order to ‘promote competition and reduce regulation … and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies’ (Eisenach and May, 2001, p. 1). Upon signing the Act into law in 1996, President Bill Clinton proclaimed that it would ‘help to create an open marketplace where competition and innovation can move as quick as light’ (ibid.). In outlining the underlying principles behind the implementation of the Act, Reed Hundt, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pointed out that one of the commission’s core principles was to ‘make sure the discovered truth about competition is nowhere frustrated by the chronic urge to monopolize. Like a Hindu tale of the struggle between good and evil, the battle between competition and monopoly will last as long as markets exist. And government should always be on the good side: the side of competition’ (Hunt, quoted in Aufderheide, 1999, p. 283). His successor, William Kennard, would observe in 1998 that ‘the Act is all about competition’ (Kennard, quoted in Aufderheide, 1999, p. 301).
Extending these pro-competitive, deregulatory principles internationally, in 1998 the US government’s White Paper on internet governance proposed the creation of a new entity, whose function would be to manage internet domain name allocation: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Observing that ‘the Internet succeeds in great measure because it is a decentralized system that encourages innovation and maximizes individual freedom’, the White Paper proposed that, ‘where possible, market mechanisms that support competition and consumer choice should drive the management of the Internet because they will lower costs, promote innovation, encourage diversity, and enhance user choice and satisfaction’ (1998 White Paper, quoted in Mathiason, 2009, p. 56).
The New Economy
The dominance of free market and pro-competition principles of this kind, in communications policy and in public policy more generally, for two decades from 1990 on, has commonly been described as a dominance of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is seen as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 2) – a theory according to which ‘the production of efficient markets should be the primary goal of public policy’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2019, p. 51). The neoliberal agenda has been described by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as being built around two key principles: ‘increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets … to foreign competition’, and ‘a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt’ (Ostry et al., 2016, p. 38). Neoliberalism has been characteristically linked to the dominance of neoclassical economics in the fields of media and culture, given their focus upon rational choices made through markets by profit-maximizing firms and by individual consumers who seek to maximize personal satisfaction (Freedman, 2008; Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015; Hesmondhalgh, 2019).
I have argued elsewhere that the concept of neoliberalism lacks analytical precision and risks becoming an omnibus category for any aspect of contemporary capitalism that a particular theorist finds objectionable (Flew, 2012). My point here is somewhat different: insofar as neoliberalism has relevance as a particular and more delimited historical, institutional, and policy project, its conceptual agenda should be seen as distinct from that of neoclassical economics (Flew, 2015b). The focus on‘creative destruction, derived from Schumpeter, was different from the one encountered in mainstream media and cultural economics. Instead of seeking market equilibrium, this evolutionary economics (Cunningham et al., 2015; Potts, 2011) pointed to the ways in which digital technologies and the ICT companies that expanded into new fields disrupted established industries and markets, and in so doing cancelled the split between old media and new media from media organizations (Mierzejewska, 2018).
Freedom and Government
The connections between neoliberalism, public policy, and neoclassical economics make more sense when they are associated with the rise to prominence of economics as a dominant language of policymaking. Historically, economics has lent itself to practices of government. Michel Foucault observed that the ‘liberal arts of government’ were connected in two key respects to the rise of political economy, which can be situated in eighteenth-century Europe. First, the liberal conception of ‘reason of state’ (raison d’état) increasingly sought to set juridical limits on the power and reach of the government. The demand to do so arose from evidence about the inefficiency and overreach of actual governmental practice as much as from a wider conception of human freedom; and political economists such as Adam Smith were crucial to demonstrating the economic inefficiencies that arose from ‘unlimited’ government (Foucault, 2008, pp. 38–44).
The second major connection between the art of government and the rise of political economy was how the turn towards a ‘frugal government’ (p. 37) necessitated the assumption of ‘naturalism’ (p. 61) in market economy, which was now understood to exist independently of government. The notion that market economy has ‘natural laws’ such as those of supply and demand became the corollary to a more utilitarian and strategic approach to government. Such an approach would be based on the calculation of the costs and benefits of state intervention and on the expectation that such interventions do not unduly disrupt the ‘natural order’ that a market economy represented. According to Foucault, this led to a distinctive understanding of the nature of freedom in liberal societies:
Freedom … is not a universal which is particularised in time and geography. Freedom is not a white surface with more or less black spaces here and there and from time to time. Freedom is never anything other – but this is already a great deal – than an actual relation between governors and governed, a relation in which the measure of the ‘too little’ existing freedom is given by the ‘even more’ freedom demanded …
This governmental practice … is a consumer of freedom … inasmuch as it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms already exist: freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression, and so on. (Foucault, 2008, p. 63)
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose demonstrated the importance of economics to twentieth-century notions of governmentality, which, following Foucault, they defined as ‘a particular way of thinking about the kinds of problems that can and should be addressed by various authorities’ (Miller and Rose, 1990, p. 2). Miller and Rose argued that the phenomenon known as the Keynesian revolution in economic theory was grounded in new techniques of measuring and accounting for national economies that enabled new forms of economic policy, namely forms based upon ‘action at a distance’ – for example the use of interest rates, taxation policies, or government spending to increase the number of jobs or to constrain price inflation. From this perspective, the rise of neoliberalism – a phenomenon associated with economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Freidman, George Stigler, James Buchanan, and others – was marked by an insistence that the fine-tuning of aggregate economic variables was insufficient and ineffective when it came to achieving policy goals (Stedman Jones, 2012). Defending market capitalism on moral as well as on economic grounds, these economists proposed that government policy needed to be focused upon governing human behaviour in order to inspire a more market-oriented conduct in citizens and in businesses. This shift towards an ‘advanced liberal’ governmentality, to use Nikolas Rose’s term, proposed a ‘marketization of economic life’ and a new understanding of freedom: ‘Freedom, here, is redefined’ as ‘the capacity for self-realization which can be obtained only through individual activity’ (Rose, 1999, p. 145).
The emergence and popularization of the Internet during the period 1990–2010 can be seen as both being shaped by, and shaping, such market-oriented conceptions of freedom. These processes revolved around two key issues: the concept of a new economy based on information and knowledge, and the primacy of freedom of speech. The concept of a new economy was premised upon the idea that worldwide economies were shifting away from an industrial era based primarily on the manufacturing of physical goods and towards what was variously called a post-industrial economy, an information economy, or a knowledge-based economy – a situation in which, as Geoffrey Hodgson observed, ‘the economy becomes relatively less “machine-intensive” and more and more “knowledge-intensive”’ (Hodgson, 2000, p. 93). Authors such as Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater pointed to the opportunities presented by mass collaboration, social sharing, and open knowledge sharing to advance innovation and productivity (Leadbeater, 2008; Shirky, 2008). In perhaps the most influential conception of the new economy, Yochai Benkler proposed that the networked information economy was one where ‘the removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information … core structuring facts in the new networked information economy’ (Benkler, 2006, p. 4).
The Open Internet and Romanticism
The internet reshaped debates about freedom in particular ways. The internet was quickly embraced in the 1990s as a conduit for free minds and free markets (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), the ‘American dream’ (Dyson et al., 1994), and Jeffersonian democracy (Barlow, 1996a). It appeared to open possibilities for what Mark Poster called a ‘second media age’: a qualitative break from the industrial-era one-way communication in broadcast mode, and a new orientation towards two-way modes of communication, through ‘a decentralised network of communication [that] makes senders
