In the span of 15 years, the online public sphere has been largely privatized and is now dominated by a small number of platform companies. This has allowed the interests of publicly traded companies to determine the quality of our civic discourse, the character of our digital economy and, ultimately, the integrity of our democracies. This essay series brings together a global group of scholars working in four distinct domains of the platform governance policy discourse: content, data, competition and infrastructure.

Introduction

Platform Governance Needs a Global Response
Nanjala Nyabola, Taylor Owen and Heidi Tworek

Content

Not Just Governors: Platform Rules and Public Law
David Kaye

Until the Machine Learns Your Language, You Stay Put
Berhan Taye

Protecting Online Speech in Latin America: Are Courts the Answer?
Ivar Hartmann

The Exit Option
Chinmayi Arun

Data
European Lessons in Self-Experimentation: From the GDPR to European Platform Regulation
Joris van Hoboken

The Performativity of Ratings in Platform Work
Siddharth Peter de Souza

Governing the Datafication of Black Lives
Mutale Nkonde

World Making and Interoperation of Traveller Data
Amin Parsa

Competition

Competition Law, Digitalization and Platforms: Separating the Old Challenges from the New
Pinar Akman

Antitrust’s Crossroads
Elettra Bietti

Competition and Data Protection among Mobile Network Operators
Grace Mutung’u

How Antitrust Facilitates China’s Goal to Achieve Technological Self-Sufficiency
Angela Huyue Zhang

Infrastructure

How to Understand China’s Globalized Digital Infrastructure
Hong Shen

Beyond the Digital Cold War: Western, Eastern and Southern Tales of Digital Failure and Success
Iginio Gagliardone

Internet Infrastructure as an Emerging Terrain of Disinformation
Samantha Bradshaw and Laura DeNardis

When Managers Rely on Algorithms of Suspicion: Fraud Logics and Their Fallouts
Lilly Irani

About the Authors

Nanjala Nyabola is a CIGI fellow and an independent writer and researcher whose work focuses on the intersection between technology, media and society.

Taylor Owen is a CIGI senior fellow and the host of the Big Tech podcast. He is an expert on the governance of emerging technologies, journalism and media studies, and on the international relations of digital technology. 

Heidi Tworek is a CIGI senior fellow and an expert on platform governance, the history of media technologies, and health communications. She is a Canada Research Chair, associate professor of history and public policy, and director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver campus.

Pinar Akman is a professor of law specializing in competition law at the University of Leeds, where she is also a director at the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Digital Governance.

Chinmayi Arun is a resident fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Elettra Bietti is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, a Kennedy Scholar and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center. 

Samantha Bradshaw is a CIGI fellow and assistant professor in new technology and security at American University.

Siddharth Peter de Souza is a postdoctoral researcher at the Global Data Justice project and the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society.

Laura DeNardis is a CIGI senior fellow and professor and endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society at Georgetown University.

Iginio Gagliardone is a research fellow in new media and human rights in the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford.

Ivar Hartmann is an associate professor of law at the Insper Institute of Education and Research in São Paulo, Brazil.

Lilly Irani is an associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego.

David Kaye is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and director of its International Justice Clinic.

Grace Mutung’u is a research fellow at the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law at Strathmore University in Kenya.

Mutale Nkonde is the founding CEO of AI For the People, a non-profit communications agency.

Amin Parsa is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Gothenburg University.

Hong Shen is a systems scientist at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Berhan Taye is an independent researcher, analyst and facilitator who investigates the relationship between technology, society and social justice.

Joris van Hoboken is an associate professor at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam and a professor of law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Angela Huyue Zhang is an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong.