Regulating Digital Platforms (BLAW20002)

This subject offers an overview on how law interacts with online digital platforms. It introduces students to different types of digital platforms and their business practices, as well as a selection of fundamental regulatory domains in the information economy.

In recent years online digital platforms have become a site of critical study. Early Utopian visions of the internet included open speech environments, anonymous interactions, and non-hierarchical networks. Today’s cyberspace, however, is deeply hierarchical, embedded in a surveillance and data-processing based economy, with work, social life, and commerce all channeled through increasingly powerful digital platforms. Online digital platforms now dominate activities like search, shopping, and social media, as well as coordinate offline activities like ride-sourcing and labour-hire. Some have suggested the massive power of digital platforms emerged under conditions of 'lawlessness'. Close analysis makes clear however, that law – its existence, interpretation, and enforcement – are all critical to how the digital economy is structured and how platforms monetize their position.

This subject explores different types of online digital platforms, the ways they monetize data, and how they exert power in the digital economy. Examples include controlling the visibility of websites, products, content, and people with ranking algorithms; renting access to repositories of intellectual property; facilitating double-sided marketplaces; and selling advertising. Understanding the platform economy means coming to grips with the development of large AI models, industrial scale data mining and refining, the monetization of user attention, and the ways platforms coordinate actors in multi-sided markets.

Through a selection of case studies highlighting ongoing regulatory controversies in different legal domains, this subject demonstrates how law both contributes to and limits the power and practices of platforms. Examples include how data protection and privacy laws shape consumer profiling and behavioural advertising; how accountability and transparency requirements regulate the visibility of ranking systems and other forms of algorithmic decision-making; how competition law manages monopolies and anti-competitive behaviour; and how labour law enables platforms to limit their obligations to workers.