Regulating Platforms. Terry Flew
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(Australian Law Reform Commission, 2012; Moses, 2010).
Over the course of the 2010s, there was a significant shift in public sentiment towards the regulation of online content. There was growing concern about the role played by digital platforms in the distribution of online content and about how the relationships between content distributors and users were mediated through such platforms. There was the role played by what Ananny and Gillespie have termed ‘public shocks’, that is, online public events that ‘suddenly highlight a platform’s infrastructural qualities and call it to account for its public implications’ (Ananny and Gillespie, 2017, p. 2). There have been many examples of such public shocks; they include the livestreaming of murders, of sexual assaults, of acts of violence, and, in March 2019, of the Christchurch mosque atrocity, in which an Australian-born terrorist murdered fifty people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (this was streamed on Facebook Live). A variety of public scandals involving the misuse of personal data have also plagued the largest platform businesses, most notably Facebook, which saw the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018: the data of up to 87 million Facebook users were harvested by political campaigns such as the Brexit referendum in 2016 or Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign in the same year.
The surprise election of Trump in 2016 also drew attention to the pervasiveness of fake news on social media platforms, the potential for electoral manipulation by politically motivated actors, and digital platforms’ lack of accountability for news content accessed from their sites (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Benkler et al., 2018; Caplan, 2017; Flew, 2019). In a lively statement of the societal problems presented by the dominant digital platforms, the actor and comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, in his address to the Anti-Defamation League, described these platforms as ‘the greatest propaganda machine in history’:
Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others – they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear … We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends. (S. B. Cohen, 2019)
These developments added up to a ‘techlash’, to use a term coined anonymously in the Economist (2017). There were a range of public enquiries into the power of digital platforms, adverse findings related to companies such as Google and Facebook, and growing calls by legislators, regulators, and academics for the break-up of digital platforms (Warren, 2019). Clearly, public shocks such as the livestreaming of the Christchurch mosque atrocity on Facebook Live prompted community demands to address the power of technology giants and to attribute social responsibility for the content carried by digital platforms. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was also a catalyst for change, particularly as it revealed the limitations of the recurring cycle of regulation by public apology and vague calls for more focused self-regulation that has long characterized the responses of CEOs of digital platforms to data breaches and privacy-related scandals (Flew, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). But the demands for more regulation of the internet and the ‘policy turn’ in debates surrounding internet governance had roots in the transformations that had occurred in the digital environment over the course of the 2010s.
Looking beyond the immediate issues that have underpinned the techlash, we can identify five factors behind these wider structural changes. These are:
1 (1) the changing political economy of the internet, particularly around the rise of platform monopolies and oligopolies;
2 (2) the platformization of the internet, which shifts debates around governance from whether the internet is or should be governed to how it is governed and who makes the relevant decisions;
3 (3) the degree to which concerns about the ‘mass’ nature of digital media and communication have come to the forefront of contemporary debates about the internet and digital culture;
4 (4) the paradoxical relationship of populist politics to digital platforms, whereby platforms function as a primary means of reaching potential supporters outside traditional mass media channels, while at the same time fomenting opposition to ‘tech elites’ as part of a wider anti-elitist politics;
5 (5) new debates about the role of regulators and the return of regulatory activism, after a long period during which nation-state regulatory agencies were seen as being less significant than corporate self-regulation.
From Innovation to Monopoly: The End of the Fifth Long Wave
The internet was generally seen as unleashing a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurial activity, with digital start-ups challenging incumbents in a range of industries, including the media. The boom in the technology stock index of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) and the success of initial public offerings (IPOs) of companies such as Netscape (1996), Google (2004), and Facebook (2012) contributed to the sense that the digital age was one associated with a new form of capitalist market economy. The rise of the internet was seen as part of the ‘fifth long wave’ of capitalist development, also known to us as the information age or the informational technoeconomic paradigm.
This position was related especially to Manuel Castells’s concept of a network society (Castells, 1996), but it also drew upon the literature on technology and innovation associated with authors such as Christopher Freeman and Carlota Perez (Freeman, 2008; Perez, 2010), who were in turn inspired by the Austrian economist and innovation theorist Joseph Schumpeter (McCraw, 2007). Perez argued that technoeconomic paradigms are distinct from simple clusters of technological change, as they involve transformations not only in systems of production and forms of consumption but also in cost structures, new spaces for entrepreneurial activity, and institutional and organizational forms (Perez, 2010, pp. 191–7). Such paradigms are marked by significant innovation, but also by considerable disruption, until such time as ‘the new TEP [technoeconomic paradigm] becomes the shared, established and unquestioned “common sense” both in the economy and in the socio-institutional framework’ (p. 199). The movement of a technological innovation trajectory is shown in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 Trajectory of a Technological Innovation. Source: Perez, 2010, p. 187.
As the fifth long wave placed information and communication technologies at the forefront of globally networked economies, it is not surprising that many of the biggest impacts were felt in the information, media, and communication industries. As the internet had core elements such as the proliferation of information available to networked users at minimal to zero cost, radically decentralized models for the production, distribution, and circulation of digital media content, and horizontal or peer-to-peer communication at multiple scales through easy-to-use social media platforms, it was seen as a natural platform for disruptive innovation (Benkler, 2006). In the media sector, to take an important example, these new digital communications ecologies were highly disruptive of traditional media industries, as they were typically reliant on copyright-based business models, monopolies or oligopolies at a defined geographical level (e.g. local or national newspaper and broadcast media industries), and the credentialed expertise of professional media content creators such as journalists, photographers, filmmakers, and so on. The internet offered the basis for a ‘pro-am revolution’, setting the stage for new forms of competition between the incumbent media industries and those that promoted user-created media content (Shirky, 2008, 2010).
If we place the initial phase of the fifth long wave in the 1970s and early 1980s, as Castells, Perez, and others do, then we can see the 2010s as marking its last phase. This does not mean that the technologies or businesses that exemplified it simply disappear: automobiles remain vitally important as an emblematic fourth long wave industry, as do railways as a third long wave sector. But two characteristic features of the latter stage of a long wave are the growing concentration of ownership and a decline in the amount of innovation; and we can find evidence for both in the