In Chapter 4, we turn to the contemporary manifestations of the managerial approach. To the extent that we view digital technology as a problem, we tend to think of it as a problem with managerial solutions. In other words, we tend to believe that the right experts, in the right institutions, focusing on the right questions, could make the harms of digital technology disappear. Some want to erect new administrative agencies or private “oversight boards” to govern digital life; some want to empower courts to address the “addictive” features of social media; others prefer to use public officials and NGOs to put pressure on technology platforms themselves. In each of these cases, reformers call on private or public managers to resurrect the goods of robust associations without defending associations themselves. We show that seemingly disparate efforts to address “digital addiction,” fight the “loneliness epidemic,” combat “misinformation,” regulate AI development, and reimagine “privacy” all fall into this same trap. These are often misguided attempts to respond to problems better understood and addressed as the consequences of a social order in which intermediary associations lack the three powers.

In Chapter 3, we trace the origins of the “managerial approach” to technology regulation. In the twentieth century, as mass communication weakened America’s associational life, reformers increasingly entrusted experts and managers with the task of producing social goods such as civility and accurate information. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has increasingly extended robust First Amendment rights to mass media companies, paving the way to an emerging status quo in which digital platforms themselves are “protected speakers” because they “select and shape other parties’ expression into their own curated speech products." Radically constraining the scope of technology regulation, courts have strengthened the authority of private managers over the terms of social life. The modern First Amendment, which once protected the autonomy of robust associations in the public sphere, has come to do the exact opposite: protect the forces of homogenization that undermine robust associations. Meanwhile, even private actors risk offending the rights of platforms when they attempt to build third-party applications – known as “middleware” – that interoperate with dominant platforms to empower users to modify platform features.

In Chapter 2, we argue that the platformization of our social order – the process by which platforms appropriate the infrastructure of our social life – is fueled by three “structural trends.” First, Network Scaling: digital platforms rely on network effects that subsume human activities, imposing opportunity costs on those opting out. Second, Context Collapse: digital platforms appropriate communicative infrastructure at scale, removing the boundaries of membership and information on which intermediary associations depend. Third, Managerial Control: platform managers exercise the competencies that once justified the authority of independent, self-fashioning associations. By itself, none of these “structural trends” need imperil collective action. Our challenge comes from the way in which these structural trends interact with each other, a relationship that we attempt to untangle. We argue that, considered as one, the three structural trends form a self-reinforcing cycle: We let platforms subsume our activities, which undermines our ability to self-organize, which, in turn, makes us outsource more and more activities to digital platforms.

This chapter traces the forms of epistemic violence that asylum seekers are exposed to when using data from digital platforms to substantiate their claims for international protection. Drawing on a selection of decisions by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber in the UK, it challenges accounts of generalised digital surveillance by showing how asylum seekers are forced to engage in more and more data wrangling without resources, time or equipment. In so doing, asylum seekers do not just have to make themselves surveillable but are confronted with a demand to know the contours and limits of surveillance on digital platforms. By introducing the concept of platform power, the chapter shows that asylum seekers face an impossible demand to know the unknowable. Platform power undoes the binaries of privacy/publicity, transparency/opacity, openness/secrecy, and monitoring/indifference. It also obfuscates the attempts to ascertain the likelihood of digital surveillance.

In Chapter 5, we propose an alternative approach to technology regulation that focuses on (re-)building robust associations online and offline. We propose a three-tiered policy agenda. First, we propose measures to change the design of digital platforms to empower users to erect boundaries of information, membership, and authority among themselves. To this end, reformers should legally empower the production of “middleware,” third-party software that interoperates with dominant platforms to let users change the rules of social interaction and content moderation. Second, we propose measures to help intermediary associations assert control over both digital and physical spaces. We consider smartphone bans in schools, a “right to disconnect” outside the workplace, and even subsidies for institutions of art and culture that outlaw the use of technology within their walls. Third, we entertain more radical measures to carve out coordinated times and spaces away from technology. These include local “digital Sabbath” policies that (totally or partially) restrict internet usage for a limited, recurrent period.

This chapter uses the relationship(s) between data and mobility through physical spaces to explore why the characterization of data as infrastructure might matter for law- and policy-makers. As sets of structured data flows layered over other infrastructures have multiplied and intersected with practices of data extraction and appropriation, some of those data flows—in particular, data flows maintained by entities with the resources to manipulate them in real time and at scale—have come to function as infrastructures in their own right, destabilizing existing settlements regarding the movement of people and goods. Data infrastructures (are designed to) scale both vertically and laterally; they are nimble, flexible, and adaptable to new uses. The infrastructure lens helps to explain some of the challenges that regulatory efforts have faced and suggests some important questions about newer, platform-specific regulatory models that are now beginning to emerge.

The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends efforts to build technological boundaries – like smartphone bans in schools – that empower cultural, educational, political, and social organizations to set their own terms for how we gather and communicate. It also calls for legal reform to enable the creation of “middleware” and even entertains the pursuit of local “digital Sabbath” policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we’ve lost and imagine what we might build in its place.

Corporate executives increasingly find that ordinary operational choices, from algorithm design to supply chain management to pricing, generate intense social and political controversy. This chapter argues that such episodes are not anomalies caused by polarized politics or activist overreach, but inevitable consequences of how modern corporations operate. Three interconnected forces drive this transformation. First, the drive for efficiency at scale leads corporations to impose uniform standards and comprehensive monitoring across vast operations, turning routine business decisions into de facto social policy. Second, forced transparency in the digital age means companies now possess detailed data about their social consequences, while stakeholders wield powerful tools to monitor corporate behavior and mobilize responses. Third, profit maximization no longer yields uniform investor preferences, as shareholders bring heterogeneous values and irreconcilable visions of how profitability should be achieved. These forces interact to make corporate social impact unavoidable, yet corporate law, shaped by Delaware precedent and federal securities regulation, neither accounts for the full extent of that impact nor builds decision-making processes capable of accommodating it. The chapter establishes a diagnostic framework for understanding why conventional governance approaches fail and what new approaches companies actually need.

This chapter explores the regulatory challenges posed by the ‘extreme public sphere’: Alt Tech platforms that serve as media infrastructures for far-right ideologies. Triggered by the deplatforming of extremist accounts from mainstream platforms, platforms such as Gab, Bitchute, and Rumble emphasise near-absolute freedom of expression and minimal content moderation. These platforms amplify toxicity and potentially radicalise users through echo chambers. The chapter critiques the European Union’s regulatory responses, including the Digital Services Act and Codes of Conduct/Practice on hate speech and disinformation. These instruments assume that platforms are economically motivated, incentivised to maintain ‘clean’ environments for advertisers and users. However, Alt Tech platforms primarily act politically and rely on donations and subscriptions rather than advertising. As they have fewer users than mainstream platforms, they evade the risk audits and stringent obligations mandated for Very Large Online Platforms. Despite nominal compliance with legal requirements, such as user-driven moderation, Alt Tech platforms continue to host significant volumes of hate speech and disinformation. While regulation is essential, addressing the broader societal conditions that enable far-right ideologies – structural discrimination, inequality, and distrust – is critical. A whole-society approach that considers the entire communicative ecosystem could foster a more inclusive and resilient digital public sphere.

Welfare economic theory seeks the justification for government intervention in markets, in market failure, and in distributional issues. An analysis of the market failures that exist in a specific industry or market can not only provide justification for government regulation or other kinds of intervention in general, but it can also suggest which type of intervention or regulation is optimal from a welfare economic perspective. This chapter addresses the question of how the emergence of news aggregator platforms and the introduction of generative AI in news production have affected the market failures that constitute the core problem underlying private investment in news production. The focus of the analysis is on the public good character of news and the positive externalities of news production. The question addressed is: Have the consequences of these existing market failures become more prominent or have they been resolved by these developments? Based on this analysis, the chapter discusses how this informs policy concerning these developments.

Infrastructures that underlie public debate have a significant role in public opinion formation and have long been regulated in multiple ways. Limiting the domination of opinion power by particular interests has been one of the stated aims of such regulation. But the approaches have also depended on the often-unstated presumption of a journalistic-editorial role being highly influential in the formation of public speech and opinion. This chapter examines how communication infrastructures have changed with the development of major platforms and resulting changes in journalism’s role within public debate. These changes raise new regulatory challenges if opinion power is to be limited, and they make the positive dimensions of freedom of expression all the more valuable for understanding what would now be required for communicatively legitimate forms of democracy. The chapter examines aspects of the Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act in light of freedom of expression’s positive dimensions to consider how European law and practice might promote a pluralism of public speech that is curated in the audience’s interests.

By 2022, social media platforms had become more prominent access points to news than traditional news media platforms. Although news media also draw benefits from online platforms, they find themselves in an increasingly asymmetric relationship that appears to harm journalists and new media’s ability to generate revenues online. Remedying the uneven playing field between big tech and news media has been a recurring ambition of European media policy. In the context of literature on corporate political activity, this chapter investigates how three big tech companies, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, have positioned themselves in relation to EU policymaking that aims to strengthen the rights of journalists, news media and press publishers online. The chapter argues that while these big tech companies primarily seek to preserve their own business models and reputations, the media policy domain also reveals a split in their lobby narratives. Due to lower exposure to reforms in digital media policy, Microsoft has been less opposed to, and in fact has campaigned for, stronger protection for news media against digital platforms.

The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.

Digital goods have their own economic characteristics. They are modular information goods. As a result of these characteristics, it is attractive to use abundance strategies to build networks and communities that interact via digital platforms. These platforms are often embedded in digital product ecosystems, which consist of a number of digital platforms and products. This chapter provides a clear view of what makes digital products unique and why this invites the platformization of the digital society. It also explains why platforms and ecosystems are able to generate efficiencies in wholly new ways compared to brick-and-mortar firms.

Digital services and artificial intelligence (AI) systems provide children with immense opportunities to communicate, learn, and play, but the use of tech platforms and AI may also pose risks to children’s rights. Rights that might be negatively affected include the right to privacy and data protection, freedom of thought, the right to freedom of expression, and the right to protection from violence and exploitation. Two recent European Union legislative instruments, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), aim to regulate platforms and AI systems. This chapter investigates to what extent the protection and fulfilment of children’s rights is addressed in the DSA and the AIA. We analyse the proposals, scrutinise the legislative process, and assess how each instrument contributes to the effective realisation of children’s rights in the digital realm. We find that whereas the DSA holds great promise for advancing children’s rights, depending on actual implementation and enforcement, the potential of the AIA for successfully protecting and promoting their rights in an increasingly AI-driven world is less clear and certain.