Executive Summary

Several governments increasingly expressed an interest in reining in the market power of a number of large online ad-funded platforms through new legislative frameworks and enforcement actions in 2020. Many of these interventions explicitly aim to weaken the dominant position of these platforms and enable the creation and scaling up of alternatives to the services of the dominant companies. These goals would be achieved on the one hand by limiting the ability for these platforms to excessively collect data, and on the other hand to open up some of the data they currently possess to other market players. While these interventions don’t explicitly aim to address immediate ‘downstream’ societal harms such as increased polarization online or the spreading of disinformation, it is often said that some of these interventions might indirectly have a positive impact on the resilience of the so-called Digital Public Sphere.

This paper explores to what extent five often discussed interventions could potentially have such a positive impact on four perceived threats to the Digital Public Sphere.

From this exploration it became clear that no policy intervention offers a silver bullet to solve some of these challenges, but instead presents policy makers with a specific set of trade-offs that need to be surfaced in advance.

• Regulate platforms as public utilities...
• Impose a structural separation of dominant companies (‘break them up’)...
• Prohibit excessive data collection via third party trackers...
• Prohibit dark patterns...
• Impose interoperability requirements on dominant companies...