'Platform Administrative Law A Research Agenda' by Moritz Schramm comments
Scholarship of online platforms is at a crossroads. Everyone agrees that platforms must be reformed. Many agree that platforms should respect certain guarantees known primary from public law like transparency, accountability, and reason-giving. However, how to install public law-inspired structures like rights protection, review, accountability, deference, hierarchy and discretion, participation, etc. in hyper capitalist organizations remains a mystery. This article proposes a new conceptual and, by extension, normative framework to analyze and improve platform reform: Platform Administrative Law (PAL). Thinking about platform power through the lens of PAL serves two functions. On the one hand, PAL describes the bureaucratic reality of digital domination by actors like Meta, X, Amazon, or Alibaba. PAL clears the view on the mélange of normative material and its infrastructural consequences governing the power relationship between platform and individual. It allows us to take stock of the distinctive norms, institutions, and infrastructural set ups enabling and constraining platform power. In that sense, PAL originates-paradoxically-from private actors. On the other hand, PAL draws from 'classic' administrative law to offer normative guidance to incrementally infuse 'good administration' into platforms. Many challenges platforms face can be thought of as textbook examples of administrative law. Maintaining efficiency while paying attention to individual cases, acting proportionate despite resource constraints, acting in fundamental rights-sensitive fields, implementing external accountability feedback, maintaining coherence in ruleenforcement, etc.-all this is administrative law. Thereby, PAL describes the imperfect and fragmented administrative regimes of platforms and draws inspiration from 'classic' administrative law for platforms. Consequentially, PAL helps reestablishing the supremacy of legitimate rules over technicity and profit in the context of platforms.
'Power Plays in Global Internet Governance' (GigaNet: Global Internet Governance Academic Network, Annual Symposium 2015) by Madeline Carr comments
The multi-stakeholder model of global Internet governance has emerged as the dominant approach to navigating the complex set of interests, agendas and implications of our increasing dependence on this technology. Protecting this model of global governance in this context has been referred to by the US and EU as ‘essential’ to the future of the Internet. Bringing together actors from the private sector, the public sector and also civil society, multi-stakeholder Internet governance is not only regarded by many as the best way to organise around this particular issue, it is also held up as a potential template for the management of other ‘post-state’ issues. However, as a consequence of its normative aspirations to representation and power sharing, the multi-stakeholder approach to global Internet governance has received little critical attention. This paper examines the issues of legitimacy and accountability with regard to the ‘rule-makers’ and ‘rule-takers’ in this model and finds that it can also function as a mechanism for the reinforcement of existing power dynamics.
