The Case for the Digital Platform Act: Market Structure and Regulation of Digital Platforms

Summary

This book provides a framework for the ongoing debate on the regulation of digital platforms. It aims to unite ongoing debates on competition, content moderation, consumer protection, and public safety/law enforcement into a unified whole. Drawing on the lessons of the last 100+ years of telecommunications and media law, we see that digital platforms raise many of the same policy challenges that the rise of the telephone and radio broadcasting created in their day. Like today’s digital platforms, the advent of electronic communication and electronic mass media raised similar questions as to what responsibilities the new broadcast networks owed to maintaining a democratic society, how to protect consumers from new opportunities for fraud or abuse through the technologies coming directly into their homes, and how to address the alarming tendencies of these businesses to gravitate to monopoly absent regulatory intervention. As with Silicon Valley, the rise of broadcasting and the telephone went through an initial stage of techno-euphoria to a subsequent “techlash” as the enormous economic, political, and social power of these increasingly concentrated industries became clear.

Specifically, I propose the following to comprise a federal “Digital Platform Act”: