Week 7: Governing the

Internet – Policy &

Regulation

Dr Joanne Gray
Digital Cultures/MECO
 We acknowledge the tradition of
custodianship and law of the Country on
which the University of Sydney campuses
stand. We pay our respects to those who
have cared and continue to care for Country.
 Source: Washington Post, 2019.

Part 1: What
are the issues?
The University of Sydney 3
Policy status of Internet companies
• Policy arrangements have tended to give internet companies considerable latitude to
self-regulate
• US s. 230 Communications Decency Act – gave Internet companies intermediary
status (‘safe harbor’)
• Capacity to manage content on their web sites/platforms without becoming
‘publishers’ or ‘media companies’ – different legal status
• Internet companies were seen as innovative and entrepreneurial – ‘creative
destruction’ – government regulation would inhibit such innovation
• Media and communications policy was seen as mostly applying to ‘old media’ –
regulatory ‘silos’ based on how the content is delivered (in a newspaper, on the
television etc.) – not well suited to media convergence

The University of Sydney 4

Governments lack the capacity
to regulate tech in the public
interest

‘High tech runs three times faster than normal

businesses. And the government runs three times
slower than normal businesses. We have a nine-times
gap … so what you want to do is you want to make
sure that the government does not get in the way
and slow things down.’
(Google CEO Eric Schmidt, quoted in Zuboff, 2019, p.
104)

The University of Sydney 5

What has been changing?
What has been referred to as the ‘techlash’ has been pushing in the direction of greater
regulation of digital tech platforms
• Wikileaks and Edward Snowden revelations confirmed close links between US tech
companies and US government agencies
• Recurring concerns about privacy breaches at Facebook and limits to ‘regulation by
public apology’ – Zeynep Tufecki, Mark Zuckerberg’s “apology tours” – 14 apologies
in 14 years
• Trump election and Cambridge Analytica scandal pointed to role of misinformation
and ‘fake news’
• Public shocks about horrific events carried on live platforms e.g. Christchurch
Mosque shootings on Facebook Live 2019

The University of Sydney 6

 1. Privacy and security – no. of US citizens
concerned about online invasion of privacy has
increased from 58% in 1998 to 91% in 2018
2. Data uses and dataveillance – ‘the monitoring of
What are citizens on the basis of their online data’ (van
Dijck, 2014, p. 205)
the issues 3. Algorithms – accountability and transparency of
algorithmically-based decision-making
of concern? 4. Misinformation, disinformation and ‘fake news’
– relationship between platform algorithms and
politically motivated ‘bad actors’; COVID-19
misinformation etc.

The University of Sydney 7

 5. Hate speech and online abuse – where to ‘draw
the line’? Who draws it? Question of collective
as well as individual online harms (e.g.
platformised racism)
What are 6. Impact on cultural production, media and
creative industries – terms-of-trade between
the issues platforms as content distributors and content
creators (e.g. future of journalism)

of concern? 7. Information monopolies – dominance of small

number of companies over digital economy in
‘winner-takes-all’ or ‘winner-takes-most’ digital
markets

The University of Sydney 8

Conclusion to Part 1
• Early debates about the Internet largely saw its development as needing to occur outside
of government regulation (‘libertarian internet’)
• Governments were not seen as knowing enough about digital technologies, and their
involvement would inhibit innovation
• This has been changing with greater awareness of the power of digital platforms and the
centrality of online communication to everyday life
• There are a list of issues of concern that are emerging in different ways across the world,
including competition policy issues, content issues, and data/privacy issues

The University of Sydney 9

Part 2: Platform
Governance

Source: Imgflip The University of Sydney 10

Governance
• The term governance comes from the Latin gubernare, which means ‘to steer the ship’
• Governance tends to occur in contexts where there are multiple stakeholders whose
views and interactions need to be managed, and where there is a preference for
‘steering’ parties towards particular outcomes rather than telling them what to do
(‘command-and-control’)
• Internet governance at an international level reflects the idea that:
• No single nation-state is, or can be, in change of the internet
• Expertise resides with multiple sources (companies, governments, civil society,
scientists etc.) so there need to be a plurality of voices in decision-making

The University of Sydney 11

Governance
• Governance is a central feature of the Internet and digital platforms
• In week 4, we considered the institutions of global internet governance, and noted the
idea of multistakeholder governance
• Governance practices are an inherent feature of platform businesses, since much of the
value they create resides outside of the firm, working with multiple entities in multisided
markets, and governance regimes align the value propositions of these different parties
(content publishers, advertisers, and site users, for example) and manage the many and
varied conflicts likely to arise in brokering such relationships.

The University of Sydney 12

The platform
governance triangle
• Source: Gorwa, 2019.

The University of Sydney 13

The 1. Direct regulation by government

platform
2. Self-regulation by companies
3. Non-government organisation (NGO)/civil
society governance and monitoring
governance 4. Government-firm co-governance

triangle 5.
6.
Government-NGO co-governance
Firm-NGO co-governance

(Gorwa) 7. Government-firm-NGO co-governance

The University of Sydney 14

Examples of government regulation
• Netz DG (Germany)
• German hate speech law requiring
mandatory takedowns of content inciting
racial hatred
• General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) (European Union)
• Requirement that European ‘data subjects’
have right to withhold personal information, Digital Platforms
and need to approve uses of their personal Inquiry
data Final Report

• News Media and Digital Platforms

Mandatory Bargaining Code (Australia) June 2019

• Requirement that Google and Facebook pay

Australian news publishers for use of their
content on their sites
accc.gov.au

The University of Sydney 15

Examples of firm-NGO co-regulation
• Christchurch Call
• Voluntary agreement for online
providers to ‘take transparent,
specific measures seeking to prevent
the upload of terrorist and violent
extremist content and to prevent its
dissemination on social media and
similar content-sharing services’
• Contract for the Web
• Proposal from WWW founder Tim
Berners-Lee for a new agreement
between companies, citizens and
governments to address malicious
online content and design that
generates ‘perverse incentives’

The University of Sydney 16

Examples of self-regulation
• Facebook Oversight Board (FOB)
• ‘the real question, as the Internet
becomes more important in people’s
lives, is what is the right regulation,
not whether there should be or not’
(Mark Zuckerberg to US Congress, 2018)
• FOB is made up of 40 well-known and
independent international members
who adjudicate on selected Facebook
content moderation decisions e.g.
decision to block former US President
Donald Trump from the platform

The University of Sydney 17

Conclusion to Part 2
• The internet has been a space for regulatory and governance innovation
• Because it is inherently more difficult to regulate than traditional media due to huge
volumes of real-time user-generated content, governance has tended to be favoured
over state regulation
• At the same time, dissatisfaction with corporate self-regulation has grown, and there are
new forms of government regulation emerging, as well as co-regulation and new forms
of self-regulation (e.g. FOB)
• One way of understanding the different governance models is through the platform
governance triangle, developed by Robert Gorwa

The University of Sydney 18

Part 3: Digital
Platforms and
Media Companies

Alibaba CEO and founder Jack Ma

as a rock star. Source: AP. The University of Sydney 19
How Australians spend their time with media

Source: Statista, 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1221509/australia-in-home-media-consumption-covid/

The University of Sydney 20
Trends in
advertising

Source: ACCC, 2019.

The University of Sydney 21

Platforms as not media companies
• Section 230 CDA – gave US-based digital platforms as internet intermediaries broad
liability form content hosted on their site
• Differs from conditional liability (EU approach; US copyright) and strict liability (e.g.
China, some Middle East countries)
• Argument that primarily user-generated content is not subject to traditional publishing
norms (e.g. editorial control, content curation) and cannot be subject to similar laws and
regulations as traditional media
• The internet as a ‘never-ending human conversation’ that happens to take place on
platforms

The University of Sydney 22

 • ‘Policies pursued in the past for broadcasting,
telecommunications, and media are often
inadequate for contemporary media and

Global communications. The complexities of contemporary

digital systems and networks, cable and satellite
operations, internet-distributed content, social
nature of media, and cross-platform activities necessitate
different methods to address the issues and
digital challenges they pose. Domestic policies can
address some issues, but global policy is

platforms
progressively more germane to address
communication challenges’. (Picard and Pickard
2017: 1)
• Media policies tend to be national whereas the
reach of digital platforms is potentially global

The University of Sydney 23

 ‘Our contemporary digital environment, which
includes Internet and related activities, raises the
But do question of what, exactly, is a media company. This
question has direct implications for assumptions

platforms about the social responsibilities of powerful

platforms such as Google and Facebook […] we
acknowledge that platform responsibilities might
increasingly differ from those of traditional publishers, yet they
nonetheless may be implicated in the increasing
do media- concerns about so-called fake news and other social
problems. It should be noted that these firms are

like things?
increasingly monitoring, regulating and deleting
content, and restricting and blocking some users,
functions that are very akin to editorial choices’
(Picard and Pickard 2017: 6).

The University of Sydney 24

Changing news media value chain
Traditional model New model

Source: ACCC, 2019, pp. 168, 169. The University of Sydney 25

ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry
• ‘Digital platforms in Australia are actively involved in the publication, distribution and/or
broadcast of news online including through performing some functions that overlap with
those of news media businesses such as: selecting and curating content, evaluating
content, and ranking and arranging content’ (ACCC, 2019, p. 170).
• Excluding digital platforms from media policy makes its goals harder to achieve
• Digital platforms are increasingly dominant in the advertising market
• Exclusion of digital platforms from media policy creates regulatory imbalance and an
unfair competitive advantage

The University of Sydney 26

Convergent
media policy
Source: ACCC, 2019, p. 175.

The University of Sydney 27

Convergent
media policy
Source: ACCC, 2019, p. 175.

The University of Sydney 28

Next week- guest lecture!

Futurist, author, and

inventor: Mark Pesce
https://twitter.com/mpesce

The University of Sydney 29

 Assignment 2

The University of Sydney 30

• Thank you