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Blog Paul de Bijl: Corporate responsibility goes further than merely not violating the law

By  |  February 23, 2024

By: Paul de Bijl (Netherlans ACM)

Regulation as a delegated responsibility Last year, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into force, and on February 17, the Digital Services Act (DSA) went fully in effect, too. The DMA imposes obligations to prevent all-powerful ‘gatekeepers’ – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft – from thwarting competitors or leveraging their power to other sectors.
The DSA makes online services and platforms responsible for curbing the spread of illegal content, as well as for protecting the fundamental rights of users. As a result, citizens are able to take back some control in the digital domain. The debate over corporate responsibility has been raging for over half a century now. In 1970, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times that the only social responsibility that companies have is to increase profits, provided that they play by the rules of free and fair competition, without deception or fraud.
This so-called ‘Friedman doctrine’ places the interests of shareholders above those of stakeholders such as employees and people in the neighborhood of companies. His argument was that it is up to the government to levy taxes, and, in that way, pursue public objectives such a clean environment or a safe workplace. Perhaps Friedman wanted to confine the debate to clearly delineated arguments, yet his doctrine strikes as ideological. For example, government interventions will never be perfect.
Another assumption of the doctrine is a free society with rules in place that everyone abides by. Yet, companies not only push the boundaries and explore the gray areas, they also exert influence over the rules of the game (see the enormous sums of money spent on lobby activities alone). The precondition that nobody cheats is therefore misleading.
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