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.

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Filed Under: annemarie bridy, internet, podcast, regulation

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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.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 14 Nov 2017 @ 3:24pm

Funny How Government Regulation Sometimes Works And Sometimes Doesn’t ...
... just like the free market, really.
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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.
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