Pradip Ninan Thomas

Over the last decade or two, a handful of powerful, monopolist platforms have embraced our lives worldwide. They intermediate our socialities and relationships, what we search for on the Internet, and our online purchases. We are living in a global economy that is fuelled by the monetization of affect. One is now only too aware that various platforms are very systematically using the advantages stemming from algorithmic power and platform externalities to mine and privatize personal data that is in turn sold to advertisers who target not just the present but also future economic behaviours of users. One now also hears of the complicity of some of these platforms in data breaches that have contributed to the making and unmaking of political fortunes of key political parties across geographies. This unprecedented power of platforms is, however, being challenged today. Data breaches, evidence of platform manipulations, platform complicities with state surveillance, and their monopolist behaviours and its consequences for competition and data privacy have become the basis for regulatory responses from governments throughout the world. National and regional courts of law have collected a lot of evidence on myriad forms of platform illegalities that discriminate against competitors and that point to the privatization of personal data on a global scale. The proposed volume provides an introduction to some of the issues and challenges related to platform regulation, the conundrums and paradoxes involved, and also to some of the well-conceived and manageable regulatory pathways currently being explored by national and regional governments. It highlights regulatory responses from four jurisdictions - the European Union, USA, India, and Australia.

Exemplars, Approaches, and Solutions

Digital Platform Regulation

Thomas

This book explores the past and present of information infrastructures in India. Grounded in infrastructure theory, it explores the historical continuities between information infrastructures in colonial and post-colonial India and the compulsions of information infrastructures in contemporary India. This volume highlights the roles played by private and public sector entities in shaping information infrastructures in India, the political economy of growth in this sector and the challenges faced by the State in regulating information platforms that are also information infrastructures. It includes separate chapters on oceanic cable infrastructures that account for more than 90 per cent of data traffic between India and the rest of the world and the political economy of India's satellite program. Taking the 'long view', it argues that the provisionings of information infrastructures are by no means straight forward, that they are always expressions that are shaped by internal and external contestations, by ideological ends and business imperatives, the needs of consumers/citizens and the State, that there is a politics of infrastructure that needs to be accounted for, and that there always are winners and losers in large infrastructural projects such as Digital India.

Pradip Ninan Thomas

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