Digital Platforms are Not Media Companies/Broadcasters: Telecoms Regulation and Antitrust as Guides to Platform Regulation

Public lecture by Dwayne Winseck (Carleton University).

This presentation will focus on the recent turn away from the 'free and open internet' to the rise and regulation of planetary-scale digital platforms. The main issue it will tackle is how to think of digital platforms and their regulation, arguing that while there is a strong tendency in communication and media studies to reach for analogies to broadcasting regulation and media policy, the twinned history of telecommunications regulation and antitrust law offers a better guide to how we should think about – and regulate – the centralized and platformed internet of our times.

Bio

Dwayne Winseck is Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, with a cross appointment at the Institute of Political Economy. His research interests include the political economy of telecommunications, the Internet and media as well as communications and media history, theory, policy and regulation. He is also the Director of the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project, a project funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant. 

Dwayne’s research, data and views on media concentration and communication, media and Internet industry and policy issues are well known and have been solicited or cited widely in the scholarly literature and by the Parliament of Canada, Canadian Senate, Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Committee, World Trade Organization, the International Telecommunications Union, amongst others. Dwayne also writes regular op-eds on these topics for the press and other outlets, including as a regular columnist for the Globe and Mail.

Funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark grant 0132-00080B Datafied Living.