Digital Platform Regulation by Ninan Thomas Pradip;

Author:Ninan Thomas, Pradip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Platform Regulation: The FCC vs. the FTC

From the above rather cursory reading of data regulation in the United States, it is clear that while this country has been the bedrock for innovative and disruptive technologies and trends related to the digital that have had global consequences, in particular, the ubiquity of a global mode of production based on the generation, curation, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and sale of personal and non-personal data, the primacy of technological shapings have not been accompanied/augmented by concerted attempts to establish normative frameworks for data management. There have been multiple, varied efforts to regulate this economy although they seem scattered, silo approaches when what is required is a comprehensive approach to dealing with data as the currency for all productive activity by both data subjects and data controllers. Big Tech’s ownership and control of the data landscape—its material infrastructures and the immaterial flows of data across all productive spheres of the economy, leisure, sociality, and politics is unprecedented and is a level up from previous generations of legacy media corporations in the United States that controlled large swathes of media markets across a variety of media sectors such as News Corp., Disney, and Viacom. Although these traditional corporates remain strong, their modus operandi and ability to control over the flow of ideas and meaning have been disrupted by Big Tech intermediaries that have radically reinvented the terms for the generation and valuation of data along with control over the generative power of data and the conduits, hardware, and software through which this data flows. Their parasitic appropriations of content/data and business models based primarily on exchange and only secondarily on production has resulted in an upending of traditional approaches to content protection such as intellectual property in the wake of the sharing economy and disembedding of the corporate ‘author’ and re-embedding within a political economy that is both uncertain and unpredictable. The ability of legacy media to attract advertising revenues has been radically altered by Big Tech companies in particular Google and Facebook. The political economy of search and sociality has major implications not just for the leisure industries but for user-consumers whose data interactivities across multiple devices are shaped by frameworks provided by Big Tech.

One of the salient issues with data regulation in the United States is whether the current regulatory dispensation and involvement of bodies such as the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Communications, and other bodies have been able to do justice to the regulatory oversight required for a fast-changing, data-driven, environment. For example, in lieu of a strong regulatory environment, platforms such as Facebook periodically attempt ‘self-regulation’ although it is often the case that such steps result from the evidence of the misuse of this platform for political purposes or the manipulation of its users for economic gain. Barret and Kreis (2019:3)25 refer to what they term ‘platform transience’ meaning the organizational means employed by platforms to refine/change policies, procedures, and affordances in response to normative pressures or the perceived drawbacks or the need to better services.

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