Digital platform policy and regulation: toward a radical democratic turn

Bart Cammaerts and Robin Mansell

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article considers challenges to policy and regulation presented by the dominant digital platforms. A radical democratic framing of the deliberative process is developed to acknowledge the full complexity of power relations that are in play in policy and regulatory debates and this view is contrasted with a liberal democratic perspective. We show how these different framings have informed historical and contemporary approaches to the challenges presented by conflicting interests in economic value and a range of public values in the context of media content, communication infrastructure and digital platform policy and regulation. We argue for an agonistic approach to digital platform policy and regulatory debate so as to encourage a denaturalization of the prevailing logics of commercial datafication. We offer some suggestions about how such a generative discourse might be encouraged in such a way that it starts to yield a new common sense about the further development of digital platforms; one that might favor a digital ecology better attuned to consumer and citizen interests in democratic societies.

Keywords: digital platforms; media content; communication infrastructure; regulation; deliberation; radical democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2020-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in International Journal of Communication, 1, January, 2020, 14, pp. 135 - 154. ISSN: 1932-8036

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102628/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:102628

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().