Building the Digital Platform Commission: How To Design a Regulator To Rein in Big Tech

A discussion about the need for a sector-specific digital regulator and suggests how to design that regulator to enhance competition and protect consumers.

Since their creation in the late 20th century, digital platforms have come to play a central role in the global economy as well as in our everyday lives. While these platforms ushered in an era of new opportunities for innovation and free expression, they also pose real concerns about the impact of a handful of huge, largely unregulated digital platforms on that same free expression, privacy, personal and societal well being, and even democracy. This paper proposes structuring such a new digital regulator – the Digital Platform Commission, or DPC – as an independent commission similar to the Federal Communications Commission, and recommends that the DPC have broad powers in regard to competition, consumer protection, and research. This new agency would:

• complement, and coordinate with, agencies with existing powers to address anti-consumer and anticompetitive conduct;
• develop expertise and set standards and best practices through research;
• impose effective remedies; 
• monitor compliance; and 
• enforce effective compliance by directly bringing actions in court.