Tom Wheeler at the Brookings Institute has published an interesting article titled, “COVID-19 has Taught Us that the Internet is Critical and Needs Public Interest Oversight.” Even before COVID-19, the regulation of internet platforms has been a very hot issue in the United States and in other countries. For example, India recently announced a new regulator for Internet commerce. In Mr. Wheeler’s article, he discusses why Internet regulation is different from Industrial Age type regulation and proposes four helpful suggestions for moving forward:
First, do not pretend these challenges can be shoehorned into
industrial era regulatory structures. . . .
Second, digital companies should have a seat at the table in
the development of the rules rather than having them force-fed. . . . There should be a new federal agency that convenes, oversees,
and approves a public-private process that establishes an agency-enforceable
Digital Code.
Third, this new Digital Code is not a substitute for
antitrust enforcement. The Digital Code is about the behavior of the companies
in the services they offer to the public. If a company behaves in an
anticompetitive manner, including mergers, that should be the jurisdiction of
antitrust enforcers and the Code should not include antitrust exemption.
Fourth, the regulatory oversight needs to be principles-based
and agile. Industrial production was a rules-based linear process where each
person on the shop floor followed rules for a specific task. Industrial
regulation followed the same rigid pattern. In contrast, modern digital
products are never finished (think how your smartphone is always updating its
software). Digital products are constantly adapting to the changes in their
environment. This agile development needs to find its equivalent in agile
regulation. Heavy-handed industrial “do this or else” needs to give way to
“this is how technology is changing and business practices must evolve as
well.”
The full article is available,
here. COVID-19 may speed things up a bit.
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