From the telegraph to Twitter: The case for the digital platform act (original) (raw)
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Should We Regulate Digital Platforms? A New Framework for Evaluating Policy Options
Policy & Internet
The economic and societal impact of digital platforms raises a number of questions for policymakers, including whether existing regulatory approaches and instruments are sufficient to promote and safeguard public interests. This article develops a practical framework that provides structure and guidance to policymakers who design policies for the digital economy. The framework differs from other approaches in taking the digital business models of platforms as the starting point for the analysis. The framework consists of three pillars, namely determining a platform's characteristics, relating these to public interests, and formulating policy options. The framework then invokes a return-path analysis for assessing how the interventions affect the business model, whether it has the desired effect on public interests, and ensuring it has no undesired side-effects on public interests. The framework puts forward two key messages for current discussions on digital platforms. First, one should look at the underlying characteristics of platforms rather than trying to understand digital platforms as a single category. Second, policymakers should explore existing rules and policy options, as they seem fit to deal with several characteristics of digital platforms in a time frame that matches the rapid development of platform technologies and business models.
Digital Platforms: Has the Time come for Competition Regulation?
CCP Research Bulletin, 2016
Digital platforms are not only seizing growth, but they are also redefining the internet economy in such a way that it upsets the current competition landscape. In this article, we discuss various aspects of digital platforms. By highlighting the traits that differ digital platforms from conventional business models, we aim to show that these new unconventional economies do not clearly appear on the radar of conventional market regulations. Thus, the time has arrived for the introduction of new market regulations for digital platforms.
Digital Platforms -The New Network Industries? How to regulate them
Network Industries Quarterly, 2019
Following the 8th Conference on Regulation of Infrastructures, which took place on June 20 and 21, 2019 with a particular focus on the key challenges of digitalisation for traditional network industries in the transport, telecoms, water and energy sectors, four papers were selected for this publication due to their topical relevance. This special issue opens with an introductory article by the Members of the Scientific Committee of the conference, Professors of the Florence School of Regulation, Montero and Finger, who consider digital platforms as the new network industries and explore the network effects created by platforms. Fuentes et al. looks at the electricity sector, which is navigating major disruptions that are changing the regulatory and business landscape. The paper addresses whether these changes would help or hinder electrification, taking transportation as an example. Becchis, Postiglione and Valerio examine how platforms are giving rise to a series of regulatory challenges, with a focus on their legal definition, labour-related issues in the digital sphere and the role of data between privacy protection and competition. Knieps analyses the problem of division of labour among all-IP broadband network providers, virtual network service providers and platform operators concomitant with the implementation of adequate governance structures. Ducuing analyses the phenomenon, when several (contemplated) data sharing legal regimes appear to essentially recognise and regulate data as an infrastructure, although without explicit reference to this notion. Her research is based on three cases, namely the Open Data and PSI Directive, the on-going institutional discussion on the governance of in-vehicle data and the freshly adopted regulation of data in the Electricity Directive.
Emerging platform governance: antitrust reform and non-competitive harms in digital platform markets
Information, Communication & Society, 2023
Following the Snowden revelations, Cambridge Analytica, and a policy vacuum created by technological convergence and neoliberal reforms, policy efforts to articulate oversight of digital platform markets gathered policymaker support and public attention internationally. In the U.S., examined here as a case study of these international policy efforts, competition policy emerged as a prominent governance mechanism over digital platforms, resulting in the current antitrust scrutiny of tech giants like Google and Meta. Drawing on policy documents, fieldwork, and expert interviews, I trace how antitrust reform proposals, pitched as reclaiming democratic governance over private markets, came to dominate platform policy discussions. I examine how policy efforts to address platform power via competition grappled with non-competitive harms arising in digital markets, such as threats to user privacy and disinformation flows. Finally, I show how these debates began to converge on the contours of an emergent governance paradigm for digital platform oversight. I argue that this governance framework, which seeks to optimize market mechanisms to discipline platform markets, has significant limitations, notably in addressing issues associated with big data commodification and quantification.
Webinar “ Regulating Digital Platforms : Where Do We Stand ?
2021
CONTENT. 1. The webinar and its subject – 2. The British Proposal – 3. The German Competition Act and its new 19a section – 4. A critical analysis of the EU Digital Markets Act – 5. The practice of self-preferencing between competition and regulation – 6. Conclusions *Law Graduate, Roma Tre University. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS
Digital Platform Policy and Regulation: Toward a Radical Democratic Turn
International Journal of Communication, 2020
This article considers challenges to policy and regulation presented by the dominant digital platforms. A radical democratic framing of the deliberative process is developed to acknowledge the full complexity of power relations that are at play in policy and regulatory debates, and this view is contrasted with a traditional liberal democratic perspective. We show how these different framings have informed historical and contemporary approaches to the challenges presented by conflicting interests in economic value and a range of public values in the context of media content, communication infrastructure, and digital platform policy and regulation. We argue for an agonistic approach to digital platform policy and regulatory debate so as to encourage a denaturalization of the prevailing logics of commercial datafication. We offer some suggestions about how such a generative discourse might be encouraged in such a way that it starts to yield a new common sense about the further development of digital platforms, one that might favor a digital ecology better attuned to consumer and citizen interests in democratic societies.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) initiative, which is set to introduce ex ante regulatory rules for "gatekeepers" in online platform markets, is one of the most important pieces of legislation to emanate from Brussels in recent decades. It not only has the potential to influence jurisdictions around the world in regulating digital markets, it also has the potential to change the business models of the wealthiest corporations on the planet and how they offer their products and services to their customers. Against that backdrop, this article provides an analysis of the aims of and principles underlying the DMA, the essential components of the DMA, and the core substantive framework, including the scope and structure of the main obligations and the implementation mechanisms envisaged by the DMA. Following this analysis, the article offers a critique of the central components of the DMA, such as its objectives, positioning in comparison to competition law rules, and substantive obligations. The article then provides recommendations and proposes ways in which the DMAand other legislative initiatives around the world, which may take the DMA as an examplecan be significantly improved by, inter alia, adopting a platform-driven substantive framework built upon self-executing, prescriptive obligations.
Digital Platforms and Antitrust
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
Digital platforms are at the heart of online economic activity, connecting multi-sided markets of producers and consumers of various goods and services. Their market power, in combination with their privileged ecosystem position, raises concerns that they may engage in anti-competitive practices that reduce innovation and consumer welfare. This paper deals with the role of market competition and regulation in addressing these concerns. Traditional (ex-post) antitrust intervention will be less effective in markets driven by network effects unless it is combined with a proper (ex-ante) regulatory framework. Antitrust tools should focus on value creation and its distribution before focusing on competition. The scope of regulatory intervention should satisfy the following three criteria: i) value creation from operation of the platforms does not decrease due to the policy intervention; in particular, interventions should not reduce network effects; ii) allocative efficiency is based on distributing the value created in a fair way among market participants e.g. use of the Shapley Value. Fair and transparent rules must govern the platform ecosystem; iii) dynamic efficiency and competition ensure that incentives for market misconduct and anticompetitive strategies such as artificial entry barriers are eliminated. Market interventions that target a firm's market power should ideally retain value creation while also encouraging small firm entry and innovation. Data has a central role in online markets. Value creation is reinforced through a recursive a data capture and data deployment feedback loop which is enabled by machine learning technologies. A regulatory intervention that facilitates data sharing mechanisms, such that data will not only confer value to market leaders but also to their competitors to the benefit of consumers, is crucial for creating more competitive and innovative digital markets.
Busch, Self-regulation and regulatory intermediation in the platform economy, 2018-11-30.pdf
Forthcoming in: Marta Cantero Gamito & Hans-Wolfgang Micklitz (eds.) The Role of the EU in Transnational Legal Ordering: Standards, Contracts and Codes, Edward Elgar 2019, 2019
Digital platforms are not only market intermediaries between different groups of platform users. They are also providers of governance mechanisms that are essential for the functioning of digital markets. Moreover, public regulators are increasingly relying on platforms as regulatory intermediaries, drawing on their superior operational capacities, data pools and direct access to platform users. A future EU regulatory policy for the platform economy should consider these multiple roles of digital platforms. Considering the rapid pace of technological innovation and the variety of different business models, the regulatory framework should be flexible enough to adapt to technological and economic developments. The chapter suggests a combination of principles-based legislation and ‘techno-legal standards’ elaborated by European standard-setting organisations involving all relevant stakeholders. A model for co-regulation could be the ‘New Approach’, which has been tried and tested over many years in the field of product safety and which could be transferred to platform regulation.