Content Regulation

By: Brian Albrecht (Inside Sources) With the clock ticking down on Congress’ legislative calendar before the midterm election season begins, sponsors of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) are left with a problem. As leadership seeks to wrangle the needed 60 votes in the Senate, even the measure’s putative backers appear confused about […]

By A. Douglas Melamed1   I thought antitrust law was working pretty well when I was in the Justice Department during the Clinton Administration.  Both the Department and the Federal Trade Commission won significant merger and nonmerger cases, including of course the monopolization case against Microsoft, that established important precedents and moved the law in […]

Various regulatory attempts at taming global Internet platforms have entered the stage worldwide. These set out to renegotiate the cornerstones of a workable social contract and the expectations of the various participants in terms of social roles, acceptable behavior and reasonable means. In this vein, the European Digital Services Act (“DSA”) takes on questions of […]

As many of the world’s largest companies are platform-based technology companies, there has been a growing push worldwide to regulate these companies to address issues arising from economic, political and communications power. At the same time, their distinctive platform business models raise new challenges to regulators, such as what industries they are in, what problems […]

Following his role in the January 6th attacks on the Capitol, several online platforms banned President Donald Trump from their platforms. While scholars and commentators have spent 18 months debating the value of removing Trump from major online platforms, we still lack sufficient empirical analysis of the positive and negative consequences the ban has had […]

Technology companies have increasingly come under regulatory fire for impairing society, markets, competition, and free speech, among other things. The underlying belief is that consumers require protection in digital markets. Despite the spectrum of harms attributed to Big Tech, relatively sparse attention has been paid to society’s relationship to aesthetics and image. In contrast to […]

The difficulty of achieving consensuses over the regulation of online content moderation has created a stringent and divergent regulatory framework around the world. This fragmentation increases the cost of operating in digital global markets due to greater entry and expansion barriers. Given that countries’ legal standards over the regulation of content moderation remain too far […]

As the enactment of the DSA is coming closer, anticipations around the new rules for curbing Big Tech power are mounting. A revision of the eCommerce Directive has been long due, but its modernization will indeed bring significant and necessary changes to make the online space a safer one, establishing procedural guarantees that protect fundamental […]