Platform-regulation. Coordination of markets and curation of sociality on the Internet

Abstract

Over the course of the 2010s, the leading Internet groups, with their extensively interconnected platforms, have become the key players in the design and regulatory framing of the Internet. This paper examines the mechanisms by which they fulfil their role as structure-building, rule-making and action-coordinating core actors in today’s Web. The focus is on two essential regulatory areas: on the one hand, the private-sector organization and regulation of markets, in which they themselves, as platform operators, coordinate market processes and determine the conditions of competition; on the other hand, the technically mediated structuration and curation of social relationships and social behavior, through which the platform operators assume far-reaching regulatory functions. The few large platforms that today enable and coordinate large parts of private and public life on the Internet can – according to the thesis of this article – be understood as differentiated societal structures with a distinct institutional basis, which the platform operators shape and control to a considerable extent by means of their own rules, regulations and coordination bodies. This goes as far as the companies – which so far have been largely able to elude democratic legitimation and control – taking over quasi-sovereign tasks previously reserved for state authorities.