Open AccessEMERGENT GOVERNANCE: COMPETITION POLICY AS PLATFORM REGULATION
Author(s) -
Pawel Popiel
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12014
Subject(s) - corporate governance , enforcement , competition (biology) , dominance (genetics) , politics , competition policy , political science , economics , public administration , political economy , law and economics , market economy , monopoly , law , management , ecology , biochemistry , chemistry , gene , biology
Much of the scholarly debate around platform regulation isoutcome-focused, concerning rules and norms that should govern platform behavior, ratherthan focusing on questions of policy processes. However, the question of politics underlyingthe development of these rules is essential to understanding how and why particular forms ofoversight have developed in response to the growing scope of platform capitalism. To addressthis gap, this paper provides a preliminary account of why competition policy has emerged asa prominent governance mechanism for platform oversight, which privileges stronger antitrustenforcement and economic regulation and has resulted in antitrust lawsuits against andinvestigations into major tech companies like Google and Facebook. With the US as a casestudy, I examine a series of 2017-2020 policy debates about oversight of digital platformmarkets, exploring how the boundaries of competition policy are discursively contested andnegotiated in these debates by stakeholders ranging from policy experts to regulators topublic interest groups. I argue that these policy debates, driven by a burgeoningantimonopoly movement, produced a set of policy ideas vis-à-vis platform oversight thatcoalesced around a governance paradigm rooted in competition policy. However, the frameworkultimately ultimately prioritizes optimizing competition in digital platform markets aboveother goals, like data regulation. Consequently, it came up short in providing a policyanswer to the expansive forces driving platform capitalism. I theorize these blind spots aspartly attributable to the dominance and insularity of the competition policy framework as afoundation for governing platform sectors.