Online Platforms: Private Actors with State-like Power?

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1. Uta Kohl, “Platform Rule: Corporate Sovereignty through Immunities”

Abstract: In this presentation I will argue that the power of platforms and their “sovereign" rule of network society have not arisen ’naturally’ in response to economic dynamics of the online market, but have been facilitated and created by law. Through the grant of sweeping immunities to online intermediaries - s.230 of the US Communications Decency Act (1996) and Art 11-15 of the EU Electronic Commerce Directive (2000) and reaffirmed in Art 4-10 of the Digital Services Act (2022) - governments have handed the reins over network society to its private infrastructure providers. By doing so, governments have tapped into the governing propensity of platforms not just as intermediaries or gatekeepers of online content, but as corporate actors which are inherently immune/self-governing actors with a long-standing history of “sovereignty-sharing” with government. Through this corporate prism the extraordinary “sovereign” role of platforms in cyberspace becomes intelligible.

Speaker Profile: Uta is Professor of Law and Technology at Southampton Law School. Her research interests have been broad ranging, mostly concerning governance questions of the internet - its territoriality, dominant corporate actors, its building blocks (like personal data) and its technologies (like predictive algorithms). She is interested in the intersections of related legal regimes (e.g. private and public international law; privacy and data protection), comparative law, and critical legal readings of developments in the law-and-technology field.
Uta has been published widely, including the monograph Jurisdiction and the Internet (CUP, 2007, ppb 2010), the edited collections The Net and the Nation State (CUP, 2017) and Data-Driven Personalisation in Markets, Politics and Law (CUP, 2021, co-editor J. Eisler) and the textbook Information Technology Law (5th ed, 2016, co-authors Diane Rowland and Andrew Charlesworth).

2. Martin Husovec, “The Missing Link: Trusted Content Creators and the Future of Online Curation”

Abstract: Contemporary platform regulation is largely preoccupied with defensive empowerment — equipping users to filter, report, or escape unwanted or illegal content. This lecture contends that the law has systematically neglected the complementary challenge of constructive empowerment: securing for users a meaningful capacity to select the information environments they wish to inhabit. The neglect is not incidental. Platforms have little commercial incentive to cede curatorial control, and the state faces well-founded legitimacy constraints on editorial intervention. The result is a structural gap — a missing institutional link — between users' latent demand for quality content and their ability to act on it.
The lecture diagnoses this gap through the lens of information asymmetry. Online content markets suffer from a pre-consumption quality identification problem: unreliability, sensationalism, and inaccuracy typically become apparent only after consumption. Rational users respond by underinvesting in quality content discovery, causing high-trust, high-cost content to be crowded out not by preference but by epistemic constraint. Against this diagnosis, the lecture proposes Trusted Content Creator (TCC) associations — voluntary, self-regulating bodies that set collective quality standards and certify member content through a portable, platform-agnostic label. The TCC model draws on analogies with collective quality marks in other sectors to show how reputation-based institutions can transmit credible quality signals at scale. The lecture concludes with an account of the tripartite legal framework required: statutory recognition of TCCs as certification bodies, mandatory platform accommodation of TCC signals in recommender system architecture, and incentive-compatible accountability mechanisms to sustain associational integrity.

Speaker Profile: Dr Martin Husovec [pronounced as Husovets, or Husoveck] is an Associate Professor of Law at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Martin investigates questions of innovation policy and digital liberties, in particular, regulation of online digital platforms, intellectual property, and freedom of expression.
He is a year-long expert on platform regulation. Since the adoption of the Digital Services Act, Martin has been training professionals and civil servants from all the regulators around Europe. His book, The Principles of Digital Services Act (Oxford University Press, August 2024) is among the leading publications on the DSA. Martin’s work was repeatedly cited by Advocate Generals at the Court of Justice of the European Union.
At LSE Law School, he leads CJEU and ECtHR Intervention Clinic, where he works with students on pending technology cases. Martin has filed a number of amicus curiae briefs or third-party interventions before the European Court of Human Rights in key cases dealing with digital freedom of expression (see the overview of cases here). He also represented NGOs that intervened in digital technology cases to support the public interest before the Court of Justice of the European Union (Apple v Commission T-1080/23, Zalando v Commission T-348/23, Technius v Commission T-134/24).
Martin is a founder of the Platform Regulation Academy, an organisation dedicated to independent continuous education about platform regulation. He is also one of the rapporteurs of the Council of Europe’s Recommendation on Online Safety and Empowerment of Content Creators and Users.
Martin obtained his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich for his work on injunctions against intermediaries (published with Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is a member of the European Copyright Society (ECS), a group of prominent European copyright scholars. Martin was an advisor to the President of the Slovak Constitutional Court, national ministries in Europe and Asia, and various EU institutions in the areas of intellectual property, digital services regulation, freedom of expression, and privacy.

3. Kate Klonick, TBA