Read on Twitter
The DSA has me thinking about this old tweet. At a high level, the DSA’s message to platforms of almost all varieties is: Be deeply regulated, and regulable, or stop existing. 1/ https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1040349385635258368
I said last week that my op ed telling Congress to emulate parts of the DSA was a love letter to EU civil servants, but I’d be back with criticisms. https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1350143532590370816
Here goes the big, gestalt one. 2/
Here goes the big, gestalt one. 2/
I can see how deep, pervasive regulation makes sense if you see platforms as just a new industry sector, with attendant harms.
If you see them as the means by which ordinary people carry out huge parts of their daily life, then the DSA’s ambition is kind of mind-blowing. 3/
If you see them as the means by which ordinary people carry out huge parts of their daily life, then the DSA’s ambition is kind of mind-blowing. 3/
The DSA tries hard to set rules and processes to get to correct outcomes on things like individual content removals. But we are not going to get perfect enforcement of perfect rules out of this. We’ll just get a lower failure rate and higher sense of legitimacy. 4/
That expectation of frequent failure in individual decisions should be part of the calculation in assessing the DSA’s trade-offs. 5/
Especially since the burden of being so heavily regulated will eliminate diversity among whichever platforms survive, and prevent investment in new platforms. (Some of this thread is speculative, but this point I deeply believe to be true.) 6/
The DSA effectively forfeits competition and consumer choice as a way of shaping platform behavior, in favor of having a few heavily regulated entities. That’s a big, consequential choice that will shape our future. 7/
From what I know of the DMA, it doesn't really offset that. Not in terms of ensuring there are a real diversity of options and consumer choices on issues like content moderation. 8/
This isn’t nostalgia for some kind of free-wheeling, wild west web. It’s skepticism about totalizing visions where govts can perfectly regulate human behavior, perhaps even before it happens, via regulation of platforms. 9/
If I were a lawmaker looking at the DSA, I would want to spend serious time thinking about the competition vs. regulation tradeoff, and exactly what positive outcomes to realistically expect from the regulation, at what cost. 10/
I wish I could ask Hannah Arendt what she thinks. But I wish that about a lot of things. This wouldn’t even be first place in the list. 11/
I’d settle for asking Philip K. Dick. 12/12
I'm going to go feed my kids breakfast and hope not too many rotten tomatoes have piled up on this thread when I come back.
