26 August 2024

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Dr Emma Vines
Social Policy

Key points

• This Chronology provides an overview of key milestones in digital platform regulation from the introduction of the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act 2015 to the end of 2023.
• There are 4 primary concerns driving Australian attempts to regulate digital platforms:
  • protection from online harms
  • responding to issues related to competition and power imbalances
  • concerns for privacy and the responsibilities related to holding user data
  • protection and promotion of Australian content
• Digital platforms covered by the inquiries and reforms here include:
  • search engines (Google)
  • social media platforms (Facebook and X (Twitter))
  • digital content aggregation services (Google and Apple News)
  • digital marketplaces (Amazon, Apple App store and Google Play)
  • streaming video on demand services (Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime)
• This chronology does not cover Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Introduction

The regulation of digital platforms has increasingly occupied governments around the world in recent years, as they debate governance systems designed to ensure that platforms are trusted and trustworthy sources, organisers, and curators of public information. In this pursuit, legislators grapple with concerns around censorship versus harm minimisation; competition and diversity of social media versus a concentration of ownership and control by tech giants; and a vastly different media landscape to that of the 20th century.

In Australia, various inquiries have noted the enormous impact that digital platforms have had on the media landscape. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has noted discrepancies in regulation between traditional and new media, as well as new privacy concerns related to digital platforms, and the shift in revenue from advertising and the challenges this brings to the traditional media ecosystem.[1]

Additional concerns have been raised over the power and influence of digital platforms in spreading misinformation, as well as their capacity to enable the disruption of elections and public health campaigns, and provide a vehicle for hate speech and terrorist activity.[2]

The range of concerns raised by the growth of digital platforms has led to calls for more focused regulation and oversight.[3] While self-regulation has so far dominated, there are demands for this to change and a growing desire for accountability, evidenced through, for example, numerous appearances by the Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen to inquiries held here and internationally, as well as repeated pressure for the heads of Meta, Google and X to answer questions before governing bodies.[4] This has led some to argue that we are entering into a period of ‘regulated internet’, defined by:

… increasingly involved national governments, in the liberal democracies as well as authoritarian and one-party states, legislating in ways intended to rein in digital platform power through a series of ad hoc measures applied around areas that include economic competition, content regulation, access to user data, online harms, and privacy and security concerns.[5]

Complicating the issue, however, is that definitions of digital platforms remain unsettled, with definitions ranging from neutral platforms simply hosting content (rather than creating it), to publishers of content (or a hybrid of the two). This hinders attempts to implement top-down regulation in an industry which is constantly changing and evolving.[6]

For the purposes of this Chronology, ‘digital platforms’ are identified according to the ACCC’s approach, which sets out 3 categories:

• search engines
• social media platforms and
• digital content aggregation services, such as Google and Apple News.[7]

Also considered here are digital marketplaces, such as Amazon and the Google Play and Apple app stores, which have been the subject of additional ACCC inquiries, as well as streaming video on demand services (SVOD), such as Netflix, Disney+, Stan and Amazon Prime.[8]

Focusing on these categories of platforms, this Chronology provides an overview of key milestones in digital platform regulation, dating from the introduction of the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act 2015 to the end of 2023. Australian attempts to regulate digital platforms since 2015 have reflected 4 dominant concerns. First is protecting Australians from online harms, such as disinformation and cyber-bullying, through the introduction of a less fragmented regulatory framework and the creation and extension of the eSafety Commissioner’s remit. Second, as the many ACCC inquiries suggest, there are substantial concerns surrounding competition, particularly power imbalances between companies such as Google and Meta when negotiating with comparatively small news outlets or companies. Third has to do with privacy and the responsibilities companies and platforms have for their users’ data, made particularly evident following the release of millions of customers’ personal and medical data through the Optus and Medibank data hacks. The final consideration is the protection and growth of Australian content, with changes introduced for commercial broadcasters and further policy announcements on the issue of SVOD’s spending on local content initially expected in mid-2024, but now delayed.[9]

This Chronology does not cover ChatGPT or generative AI, with regulation of these still in its infancy and falling outside the definition of ‘digital platform’ used here.

Milestones