New Digital Realities; New Oversight Solutions in the U.S.

Abstract

The digital marketplace is wide-reaching, complicated and self-reinforcing. The systems developed to oversee an earlier time are burdened by industrial era statutes and decades of precedent that render them insufficient for the digital present. In the absence of federal oversight, the dominant digital companies have made their own rules and imposed them on consumers and the market. Just as industrial capitalism operated—and thrived—under public interest obligations, so should internet capitalism be grounded in public interest expectations. Those expectations—and the new rules to implement them—should be the reinstatement of responsibilities long established in common law: the duty of care and the duty to deal. To accomplish this a new Digital Platform Agency should be created with a new, agile approach to oversight built on risk management rather than micromanagement. This would include a cooperatively developed and enforceable code of conduct for specific digital activities. As both a failsafe and an incentive, the agency would also retain its own independent right of action.