The Broken Internet and Platform Regulation: Promises and Perils

A relatively small number of global Internet giants—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix—have come under intense and ongoing fire for precipitating a twin crisis of journalism and the media, destroying democracy, and centralizing control over the Internet. In response, a new wave of Internet regulation is now in the making in one country after another. This chapter agrees that a forceful response to the platforms is overdue but raises concerns that the case against GAFAM + has become orthodoxy, anchored in cherry-picked evidence and a tendency to see these firms as the cause of all perceived woes. I also argue that while attempts to regulate digital platforms by the standards of broadcasting regulation may be politically expedient, this approach rests on superficial analogies. It also ignores the fact that the media industries have developed in close proximity to the vastly larger telecoms, consumer electronics and banking firms since the mid-nineteenth century. The last sections of this chapter offer four principles of structural and behavioural regulation drawn from this history as guides for a new generation of internet regulation today: structural separation (break-ups), line of business restrictions (firewalls), public obligations and public alternatives.