Navigating the Online Platform Regulatory Revolution: Charting a New Course for Regulators

By: Martijn Snoep (Authority for Consumers and Markets)

Digital ecosystems, such as online platforms, play a crucial role in enabling users to interact and exchange value. These platforms use their ability to create network effects and economies of scale to fuel their innovative business models, benefiting users in many ways. However, these platforms also pose systemic risks to a fair, open, and transparent digital economy, as well as to the integrity of democratic societies. This is due to their function as gatekeepers to markets and innovation, custodians of massive amounts of personal data, enablers of algorithmic bias, and conduits for spreading misinformation and hate speech. It is therefore encouraging that the EU is implementing new regulations to permanently govern the largest online platforms. This will be a significant shift for these platforms that have grown from start-ups to digital behemoths in a virtually unregulated landscape.

However, implementing these regulations will also require significant changes for government agencies responsible for enforcing them. They will need to move away from one-off enforcement actions towards building long-term regulatory relationships, similar to those between financial institutions and regulators…

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