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.

As Chapter 1 discusses, one of the most consistent conservative critiques of social media platforms is that social media is biased against conservative content. A common policy proposal to address this is to regulate such platforms as common carriers. Doing so would require social media platforms to host, on a nondiscriminatory basis, all legal user content and to permit all users to access platforms on equal terms. While this seems an attractive idea – after all, who could object to nondiscrimination – it is not. For one thing, the Supreme Court has now recognized that social media platforms possess "editorial rights" under the First Amendment to control what content they carry, block, and emphasize in their feeds. So, regulating platforms as common carriers, as Texas and Florida have sought to do, is unconstitutional. It is also a terrible idea. Requiring platforms to carry all content on a nondiscriminatory basis, even if limited to legal content (which it would be hard to do) would flood user feeds with such lawful-but-awful content as pornography, hate speech, and terrorist propaganda. This in turn would destroy social media as a usable medium, to the detriment of everyone.

As payment is increasingly becoming part of social media, it takes on the operating, governance, and revenue models of the Silicon Valley tech industry. At the same time, new platform payments “ride the rails” of long-standing infrastructures. These conditions create opportunities for surveillance and infrastructural power, as well as new unanticipated harms for users. As the future of money is imagined, it is wise to contemplate a payment ecosystem that is – like social media more broadly – increasingly private, siloed, and rife with scams.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by comparing leadership elections in the two major UK parties following the Brexit referendum. While Conservative members of parliament acted swiftly to replace their leader, Labour was unable to follow suit, leading to an unprecedented internal crisis. These divergent paths, Kernell argues, can best be explained by attention to party rules. After briefly extending the comparison to discuss party rules in several other countries, Chapter 1 summarizes the book’s core arguments and the formal model, introduces the evidence, and provides a roadmap for the rest of the book.

Chapter 3 guides the reader inside parties by examining how candidate nominations, leadership selection, and policy platforms operate in modern democracies around the world. Kernell examines variation among these rules both within and across countries, as well as over time, and proposes a coding methodology for defining the degree of membership influence in each of the three primary dimensions. The chapter also discusses case selection and data collection.

In order to manage the issue of diversity of regulatory vision, States may, to some extent, harmonize substantive regulation—eliminating diversity. This is less likely than States determining unilaterally or multilaterally to develop manageable rules of jurisdiction, so that their regulation applies only in limited circumstances. The fullest realization of this “choice of law” solution would involve geoblocking or other technology that divides up regulatory authority according to a specified, and a perhaps agreed, principle. Geoblocking may be costly and ultimately porous, but it would allow different communities to effectuate their different visions of the good in the platform context. To the extent that the principles of jurisdiction are agreed, and are structured to be exclusive, platforms would have the certainty of knowing the requirements under which they must operate in each market. Of course, different communities may remain territorial states, but given the a-territorial nature of the internet, it may be possible for other divisions of authority and responsibility to develop. Cultural affinity, or political perspective, may be more compelling as an organizational principle to some than territorial co-location.