Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs
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14 PE 657.101
of tasks at human or even superhuman level.
3
This aspect, as we shall see, also concerns the
management of online platform and in particular content moderation.
Concerning the economic environment, some of the start-up companies of 20 years ago have
become large successful global companies, now drawing on huge technological and financial
resources. A few such companies —the leading examples being the so called GAFAM, Google,
Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft— have acquired vast market power, which enables
them to obtain large profits. Their success is based on technological and organisational
excellence, but also on quasi-monopoly positions in key ICT services.
This monopoly position
is dependent on well-known aspects of the digital economy. First comes the so-called network
effect: the greater a network, the greater the benefit that each individual can extract from it,
due to the larger opportunities to interact, and to offer and access goods and services. Then
there is the fact that in the digital domain development costs (the cost of developing software
and creating a hardware infrastructure) are high, but marginal costs (the cost of serving an
additional user) are low. Finally, automation and in particular AI facilitates scalability, as
automated solutions can be distributed to all users, and centralised decision-making can profit
from the automated analysis of vast amounts of data.
Finally concerning the social environment, a vast domain of human interactions has moved
online. Access to information, the performance of work, and social interactions are today often
mediated, prevalently or exclusively, by digital infrastructures: these activities have become
dependent on such infrastructure and are framed by the affordances and constraints that are
provided in that infrastructure.
4
This migration has recently accelerated in the context of the
COVID 19 epidemic, which has forced all citizen to rely on the digital infrastructure for most of
their needs and activities
In this new technological, economic and social context a key issue concerns the regulation of
digital services, in particular, those that fit the category of online platforms, namely, those
digital services whose purpose is to facilitate interactions between their users (whether firms
or individuals), via the Internet.
5
Online platforms have become key “infrastructures”
6
for the
activities of their users. While enabling user’s activities and indeed providing multiple
affordances for the exercise of such activities, platforms direct and constrain users
engagements, in consideration of the economic and other purposes pursued by the platform’s
owners. For instance, the leading platforms that enable users to share content online (such as
Facebook or YouTube) obtain their revenue though advertising directed at their users.
Therefore, they have an interest in keeping users on the platform, in order to expose them to
advertising and they have an interest in collecting data on users, in order to effectively target
them with ads (and use the data for further commercial purposes). To keep users online, a
platform may incentivise the production of, and access to, the kind of content, connections
3
See the White Paper on AI by the European Commission (2020). On how the allocation of tasks changes due to AI, see
Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014).
4
Among recent work that addresses the interaction between technology, socio-political change, and legal regulation, see
Cohen (2019).
5
For a discussion on the concept of a platform, see OCDE (2019), which adopts however a more restricted notion, requiring
the participation of different kinds of users.
6
Following Frischmann (2012), an infrastructure can be viewed as is a resource such that: (1) it may usually be consumed non
rivalrously, (2) Social demand for it is driven primarily by downstream productive activity that requires the resource as an
input; and (3) it may be used as an input into a wide range of goods and services. This description applies to roads, bridges,
airports, parks, and schools but also the environment, telecommunications, and computing resources.