Techdirt Podcast Episode 144: The Perils Of Internet Platform Regulation

from the not-so-easy dept

Tue, Nov 14th 2017 1:30pm — Leigh Beadon

We've been talking about internet platform regulation for a long time, but in the past year these issues have gotten a huge amount of increased focus — for a bunch of fairly obvious reasons. But a lot of people who are fairly new to the issue tend to make a lot of questionable assumptions and jump to some problematic conclusions, so this week we're joined by someone who has been studying these questions for many years — Annemarie Bridy, a law professor at the University of Idaho and Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford University Center for Internet and Society — to discuss the complicated consequences of various attempts to regulate online platforms.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: annemarie bridy, internet, podcast, regulation

3 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 14 Nov 2017 @ 3:19pm

How much of attempting to hold these companies responsible is due to adoption of closed systems? Bittorrent, RSS, and HTML are not sexy or marketable but they are resilient.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 14 Nov 2017 @ 3:24pm

Funny How Government Regulation Sometimes Works And Sometimes Doesn’t ...
... just like the free market, really.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 14 Nov 2017 @ 5:08pm

Regulation is only called for when people have no choice to use a certain company's product or service. On the internet, people have many choices, but for some strange reason tend to gangpile onto one single company's platform, in effect creating a kind of monopoly. Why is it that Amazon, Paypal, Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, etc, have come to completely dominate their market niche when there are many alternative competing services that go almost completely unused?

While it was good to see the AOL 'monopoly' busted, others emerged, but unlike AOL, tend to abuse their monopoly status by practice varying degrees of censorship against politically incorrect viewpoints, which often means that a powerful entity doesn't like someone.
[ link to this | view in thread ]