Abstract
This chapter tracks the evolution of Internet governance from the “open Internet” discourses of the 1990s towards the current “policy turn”, and the growing regulatory activism of nation-states in addressing questions around the economic, political and communications power of digital platform companies. It observes that this occurs in a context of a shift in the politics of political parties of the right towards “Big State” populism, a crisis of liberalism as a dominant policy discourse, and demands in liberal democracies towards greater regulation of digital platforms. This in turn points towards a misalignment between the regulatory activism of nation-states and international Internet governance frameworks, which tend to be premised upon multistakeholder governance and a minimal role for nation-state governments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The spectre of the Trump Administration has hung over US technology politics to a substantial degree. On the one hand, Trump was a vocal critic of “Big Tech”, and in fact issued an Executive Order in May 2020 to revoke Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act 1996, although it did not pass through the Congress or the courts. Trump supporters such as venture capitalist Peter Theil denounced Silicon Valley as a “one party state”, and prominent Republicans such as Senator Josh Hawley (R–MO.) have been vocal critics of the power of digital platform companies, in terms similar to Democrat critics such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MI.). At the same time, Trump’s relentless use of Twitter (now X) and other social media platforms to pursue his political agenda, and the extent to which misinformation was circulated on such platforms and within the wider “right-wing media ecosystem” (Benkler et al., 2018) by Trump allies, acted as a powerful catalyst for action to promote greater social and ethical responsibility on the part of digital platforms, and calls for greater regulation of digital platform companies to address their power over the communications ecosystem. Philip Napoli has argued that tech policy under the Trump Administration largely functioned as “symbolic policy making”, where the point was more to offer utterances that reflected the views of supporters (“Big Tech is hostile to conservative voices”), than to develop a substantive program of policy reform (Napoli, 2021).
- 2.
An important distinction is made here between global companies and “stateless” companies. Companies such as Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft operate globally, but have corporate headquarters in the United States, and as such, are US companies. They are also subject within the countries that they operate to corporations’ law and other laws within those territories, although there are often disputes about the relationship between national and international laws in such contexts, including the implications of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. On the importance of the “home base” to multinational corporations, see Dicken (2007).
References
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. (2019). ACCC Digital platforms inquiry final report. ACCC. https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/inquiries/digital-platforms-inquiry.
Balkin, J. M. (2020). How to regulate (and not regulate) social media. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Occasional Paper. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/how-to-regulate-and-not-regulate-social-media.
Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1996). The Californian ideology. Science as Culture, 6(1), 44–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439609526455
Barwise, P., & Watkins, L. (2018). The evolution of Digital dominance: How and why we got to GAFA. In M. Moore & D. Tandini (Eds.), Digital dominance: The power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (pp. 21–49). Oxford University Press.
Bego, K. (2017). The Splinternet. Nesta blog. http://www.nesta.org.uk/2017-predictions/splInternet.
Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.
Blaine, L. (2021). Top blokes: The larrikin myth, class and power (Vol. 83). Schwartz Books.
Bowers, J., & Zittrain, J. (2021). Answering impossible questions: Content governance in an age of disinformation. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 1(1), 1–8. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/content-governance-in-an-age-of-disinformation/
Braithwaite, J. (2006). The regulatory state? In R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Binder, & B. Rockman (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political institutions (pp. 407–430). Oxford University Press.
Bray, D., & Cerf, V. (2020). The unfinished work of the Internet. In W. H. Dutton & M. Graham (Eds.), Society and the Internet (2nd ed., pp. 403–417). Oxford University Press.
Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel. (2020). Canada’s communications future: Time to act. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/110.nsf/eng/00012.htm.
Cairncross, F. (2019). The Cairncross review: A sustainable future for journalism. UK Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-cairncross-review-a-sustainable-future-for-journalism.
Carr, M. (2016). U.S. power and the Internet in international relations: The irony of the information age. Palgrave Macmillan.
Celeste, E. (2018). Digital constitutionalism: Mapping the constitutional response to digital technology’s challenges. SSRN Papers. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3219905.
Celeste, E. (2021). Digital punishment: Social media exclusion and the constitutionalising role of national courts. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 35(2), 162–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2021.1885106
Danner, C. (2021, October 2). Trump Still really wants his Twitter account back. The New Yorker. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/trump-sues-to-force-twitter-to-take-him-back.html.
DeNardis, L. (2014). The global war for Internet governance. Yale University Press.
Denzau, A., & North, D. (1994). Shared mental models: Ideologies and institutions. Kyklos, 47(1), 3–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1994.tb02246.x
Dicken, P. (2007). Global shift: Mapping the changing contours of the world economy (5th ed.). Sage.
Dobkin, A. (2018). Information fiduciaries in practice: Data privacy and user expectations. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 33(1), 1–50. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3133104
Editorial Board. (2020, January 17). Interview with Joe Biden: Former vice president of the United States. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opinion/joe-biden-nytimes-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share.
EIT Digital. (2020). European digital infrastructure and data sovereignty: A policy perspective. European Institute for Innovation & Technology.
Flew, T. (2012). Michel Foucault’s the birth of biopolitics and contemporary neo-liberalism debates. Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, 108(1), 42–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513611421481
Flew, T. (2021). Regulating platforms. Polity Press.
Flew, T., & Gillett, R. (2021). Platform policy: Evaluating different responses to the challenges of platform power. Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 12(2), 231–246. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3628959
Flew, T., Gillett, R., Martin, F., & Sunman, L. (2021). Return of the regulatory state: A stakeholder analysis of Australia’s digital platforms inquiry and online news policy. The Information Society, 37(2), 127–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2020.1870597
Flew, T., & Iosifidis, P. (2020). Populism, globalisation and social media. International Communications Gazette, 82(1), 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048519880721
Flew, T., & Suzor, N. (2018). Global media industries and media policy. In M. Deuze & M. Prenger (Eds.), Making media (pp. 159–170). Amsterdam University Press.
Freiden, J. (2019). The politics of the globalisation backlash: Sources and implications. In L. A. V. Catao & M. Obstfeld (Eds.), Meeting globalisation’s challenges (pp. 181–196). Princeton University Press.
Friedman, T. L. (2001). The lexus and the olive tree: Understanding globalisation. St. Martin’s Press.
Goodhart, D. (2017). The road to somewhere: The populist revolt and the future of politics. C. Hirst & Co.
Gorwa, R. (2019). Regulating them softly. In T. Owen (Ed.), Models for platform governance (pp. 39–44). Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Hirsch, P. B. (2019). The web unravels. Journal of Business Strategy, 40(5), 54–58. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBS-06-2019-0120
Hong, Y. (2017). Networking China: The Digital transformation of the Chinese economy. University of Illinois Press.
Iosifidis, P., & Andrews, L. (2019). Regulating the Internet intermediaries in the post-truth world: Beyond media policy? International Communication Gazette, 82(3), 211–230. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048519828595
Jarvis, J. (2021, February 13). Statement to the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust. Medium. https://medium.com/whither-news/statement-to-the-judiciary-subcommittee-on-antitrust-54ffbc4d8b2e.
Judis, J. (2016). The populist explosion: How the great recession transformed American and European Politics. Columbia Global Reports.
Kaye, D. (2019). Speech police: The global struggle to govern the Internet. Columbia Global Reports.
Keen, A. (2018). How to fix the future: Staying human in the digital age. Atlantic Books.
Klonick, K. (2020). The Facebook oversight board: Creating an independent institution to adjudicate online free expression. Yale Law Journal, 129(8), 2418–2499. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3639234
Lemley, M. (2021). The SplInternet. Duke Law Journal, 70, 1297–1327. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol70/iss6/3
Levi-Faur, D. (2012). From “Big Government” to “Big Governance”? In D. Lei-Faur (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of governance (pp. 3–18). University Press.
Livingston, S., & Bennett, W. L. (2020). The disinformation age: Politics, technology, and disruptive communication in the United States. Cambridge University Press.
Lusoli, A., & Turner, F. (2021). “It’s an Ongoing Bromance”: Counterculture and cyberculture in Silicon Valley—An interview with Fred Turner. Journal of Management Inquiry, 30(2), 235–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492620941075
Macron, E. (2018, November 12). Speech by M. Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic at the Internet Governance Forum. https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2018/11/12/speech-by-m-emmanuel-macron-president-of-the-republic-at-the-Internet-governance-forum.
Mathiason, J. (2009). Internet governance: The new Frontier of global institutions. Routledge.
Moffitt, B. (2020). Populism. Polity Press.
Mueller, M. (2010). Networks and states: The global politics of Internet governance. MIT Press.
Mueller, M. (2017). Will the Internet fragment? Polity Press.
Napoli, P. (2021). The symbolic uses of platforms: The politics of platform governance in the U.S. Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 12(2), 231–250. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00060_1
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.
O’Hara, K., & Hall, W. (2018). Four internets: The geopolitics of digital governance (occasional paper no. 206). Centre for International Governance Innovation.
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0? http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.
Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and ideology. Harvard University Press.
Popiel, P., & Sang, Y. (2020). Platforms’ governance: Analyzing digital platforms’ policy preferences. Global Perspectives, 2(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.19094
Rosenau, J. (2002). Governance in a new global order. In D. Held & A. McGrew (Eds.), Governing globalisation: Power, authority, and global governance (pp. 70–86). Polity Press.
Rundle, G. (2021, February 19). Government serves Murdoch’s old capital, Facebook wields new. Who to hate more? Crikey. https://www.crikey.com.au/2021/02/19/facebook-news-corp-australia/.
Schemeil, Y. (2012). Global governance: Evolution and innovation in international relations. In E. Brousseau, M. Merzouki, & C. Meadel (Eds.), Governance, regulations and powers on the Internet (pp. 186–208). Cambridge University Press.
Schlesinger, P. (2020). After the post-public sphere. Media, Culture & Society, 42(7–8), 1545–1563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720948003
Schlesinger, P., & Kretschmer, M. (2020, February 18). The changing shape of platform regulation. Media@LSE. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2020/02/18/the-changing-shape-of-platform-regulation/.
Scholte, J. A. (2017). Polycentrism and democracy in Internet governance. In U. Kohl (Ed.), The net and the nation state: Multidisciplinary perspectives on Internet governance (pp. 165–184). Oxford University Press.
Scott, C. (2017). The regulatory state and beyond. In P. Drahos (Ed.), Regulatory theory: Foundations and applications (pp. 265–281). ANU Press.
Slobodian, Q. (2021). The backlash against neoliberal globalisation from above: Elite origins of the crisis of the new constitutionalism. Theory, Culture & Society, 38(6), 51–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276421999440
Soriano, S. (2019). Taking aim at Big Tech. InterMedia, 47(2), 10–15.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. (2019). Stigler Committee on Digital Platforms: Final report. University of Chicago Booth School of Business. https://research.chicagobooth.edu/stigler/media/news/committee-on-digital-platforms-final-report
Teachout, Z. (2020). Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money’. All Points Books.
Tett, G. (2017). Davos man has no clothes. Foreign Policy. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/16/davos-man-has-no-clothes-globalisation/
The Economist. (2018, January 20). The techlash against Amazon, Facebook and Google—and what they can do—a memo to big tech. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/01/20/the-techlash-against-amazon-facebook-and-google-and-what-they-can-do.
The Economist. (2021, April 22). Boris gives the European Super League the boot. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/04/22/boris-gives-the-european-super-league-the-boot
U.S. House of Representatives. (2020). Investigation of competition in Digital markets: Majority staff report and recommendations [Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee of the Judiciary]. U.S. House of Representatives.
Warren, E. (2019, March 8). Here’s how we can break up Big Tech. Medium. https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c?fbclid=IwAR1U5IhiY_nB2QwXjTwdRMkec9rFKHfJU0OTMs2hhUPQNlDOMtOWrEdU1ek.
Winseck, D. (2020). Vampire squids, ‘the broken Internet’ and platform regulation. Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 11(3), 241–282. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00025_1
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new Frontier of power. Hachette.
Zuckerberg, M., & Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee (2018, April 11). Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Flew, T. (2024). The Return of the Regulatory State: Nation-States as Policy Actors in Digital Platform Governance. In: Padovani, C., Wavre, V., Hintz, A., Goggin, G., Iosifidis, P. (eds) Global Communication Governance at the Crossroads. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29616-1_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29616-1_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-29615-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-29616-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)