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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1454211
This article is part of the Research Topic Self-Regulation and Co-regulation as Governance Solutions View all 4 articles

The Limits of Internet Self-Regulation -The EU's Policy for Digital Internet Intermediaries

Provisionally accepted
Seamus Simpson Seamus Simpson *
  • University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This article contributes to knowledge on EU policy for Internet intermediaries by providing a characterisation and analysis of the system of governance for intermediaries set out initially in the 2000 Directive on E-Commerce and recently updated in the 2022 Digital Services Act. The article shows how the new regulatory system of the DSA, unlike its predecessor, is underpinned by a strong European public transnational network governance approach, with a very noteworthy instantiation of regulatory responsibility at the EU level in respect of the power given to the European Commission to regulate Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs). This reflects an attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of a largely light touch, self-regulated environment faced by Internet intermediaries. The article contends that the EU's new system of platform regulation creates instead a trans-European network (public regulatory dominated and epistemic regulatory actor enabled) more akin to the neoliberal model of EU telecommunications governance than the private interest self-regulatory aspirations of Internet governance specialists of the early 2000s, when the DEC was established.

    Keywords: Self-regulation, co-regulation, Network governance, EU, Internet intermediaries

    Received: 24 Jun 2024; Accepted: 12 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Simpson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Seamus Simpson, University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom

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