the markets themselves failed to behave as the models predicted!
There is considerable evidence worldwide of a growth in regulators’ attention to the structure of markets in the digital economy and to the conduct of digital platform companies. This new regulatory activism first became apparent in the European Commission through adverse judgements on Apple’s and Google’s alleged anticompetitive practices and through the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which outlined a principles-based framework for the handling of data within the European Union (Keen, 2018). But the impetus towards regulatory activism has accelerated since 2016, particularly in light of scandals such as those around Cambridge Analytica and populist concerns about the power of digital platforms. Indeed it has reached the point where key industry figures such as Facebook’s CEO concede, at least publicly, that ‘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’ (Zuckerberg and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, 2018).
Conclusion
This chapter has focused on how the early internet was established around a mix of ideas, interests, and governing institutions – the three Is – that have earned it the qualifiers ‘libertarian’ and ‘open’. Using this three Is framework, the chapter has argued that the core structuring principles of the internet during the period 1990–2010 were free market economics, theories of the new economy based on creative destruction, the primacy of free speech, a communitarian ethos of social sharing, and a romanticism influenced by the New Left counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. These structural and ideational underpinnings, which were not central to the evolution of the internet in parts of the world such as China, have been gradually unravelling. Among the causes for this process are the changing political economy of the internet, platformization, the fact that online spaces have increasingly come to resemble mass media, a populist politics that demands greater regulation of big tech, and a new regulatory activism and reassertion of public interest and social responsibility principles.
The ideational structure that had long underpinned the absence of external oversight and regulation – the joint facts that the internet was fundamentally different from other media, that governments would inevitably do more harm than good, and that regulation would come at the cost of competition and innovation – had profoundly shifted by the late 2010s. The libertarian internet and the hopes, fears, and desires that had animated its evolution since the 1990s gave way to the platformized internet. The question was now who governed its development and in whose interest, rather than whether cyberspace was indeed governable at all.
Notes
1 1 One important countervailing force is the extent to which digital platform giants compete with one another. For example, Microsoft’s Bing is potentially a search engine alternative to Google, while Apple’s concerns for the security of its users’ data can be seen as a corporate strategy designed to expose the data-driven business model of Facebook rather than as a demonstration of corporate altruism (Economist, 2021). This competition between tech giants is not competition in the classical sense, but more in the sense in which Joseph Schumpeter took it to occur in advanced capitalism in the absence of new entrepreneurs (Schumpeter, 1950).
2 2 Two further points can be made here. The first is that so-called mass media such as television take less and less of a ‘mass’ form. With the rise of video on demand and with the availability of content in the form of a catalogue ready for consumption any time (rather than tied to a specific schedule), television services increasingly resemble digital platforms. Second, much of the content of digital platforms comes from the largest traditional media providers. In their study of online news consumption during the 2019 general election in the United Kingdom, Fletcher, Newman, and Schulz found that online news was a winner-takes-most market: BBC News and the Daily Mail Online accounted for nearly half (48%) the time spent on news, and the top five sites, including the Guardian, the Sun, and the Mirror, accounted for two thirds (66%) of the time spent on online news sites. Alternative news sites accounted for less than 1% (Fletcher et al., 2020).
3 3 Lewis et al. (2018) observed that populist parties accounted for about 25% of votes in elections in European states in the mid-2010s, as compared to about 5–7% in the 1990s. Given that there are conceptual difficulties with defining a ‘populist party’, an alternative indicator is the declining vote of the traditional parties of the centre-right and centre-left. In the 2019 European parliamentary elections, the three leading traditional blocs (conservatives, liberals, and socialists or social democrats) received 52.5% of all votes, to hold 55.2% of seats. As recently as 2009, these three blocs accounted for 72.4% of votes and 75.6% of seats.
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