We are amid an international resurgence in public interest and regulatory activity focused on the challenges posed to economies and democracies by corporations in key markets in the global digital economy currently dominated by a small number of major firms. As “big tech” takes on more important roles in society, governments and policymakers worldwide are engaged in a slew of regulatory initiatives aiming to reign in the dominant market power of these companies and to ensure that their public obligations match their impact on economy and society. While the discussion of platform regulation tends to foreground issues of content moderation and often turns to broadcasting regulation and media policy as guides for digital platform regulation, this chapter, in contrast, highlights regulatory tools from the antitrust tradition and communications regulation in North America. From the antitrust tradition, we highlight structural- and conduct-oriented regulatory tools, such as: break-ups, market caps, operational/vertical/data separation, and prohibitions against predatory pricing. We also highlight ex-ante rules and public obligations that aim to ensure that essential communications services providers do not abuse their gatekeeping power and that they serve public interests: i.e. common carriage, interoperability and interconnection, privacy and data protection, mandatory information disclosure, and universal and affordable service obligations. While the Chicago School and neoliberals “free market” agenda largely set the policy and regulatory framework for the internet since the early 1990s, today this approach is being beaten back by both, the rebuff of reality and a constellation of progressive technocrats aligned with a resurgent neo-Brandesian approach, both of which have been active and original in current debates over democratic antitrust and digital platform regulation. As a result, a new approach is taking shape that foregrounds regulatory tools drawn from the traditions we focus on, for example, the European Commission’s trilogy of Google cases (amongst others) in the last decade and its proposed Digital Markets Act to address the perceived failures of those cases. In the United States, the Subcommittee on Antitrust’s (2020) Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets Report, the suite of antitrust bills proposed by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee (United States, 2021), and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (2021) Amended Facebook Complaint point in a similar direction. We also invoke developments in Australia, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom to illustrate the renewed push to reign in the excesses of digital dominance and a shared set of proposed regulatory remedies.These approaches reveal alternate future policy models to the prevailing global Internet governance model. Done well, such approaches could help to bring about a better, more diverse, useful, enjoyable, and democratic array of Internet services
