ABSTRACT
Facebook’s scale and dominance are factors driving regulatory action. Martin Moore and Damian Tambini state that digital platforms not only operate on a scale bigger than previous regulatory challenges, giving them structural dominance, but also have explicit political and social aims and perform genuine civic functions. The key driver behind the new regulatory approach is Facebook’s dominance. Facebook dominance drives the reforms, along with a growing distrust of Facebook’s seriousness about these issues, no matter the avowed commitment of its senior figures. Facebook responds by pointing to the amount of material posted on its platform every day, with billions of posts and hundreds of millions of photographs. Franklin Foer says that Big Tech companies owe their dominance not only to innovation but also to ‘tax avoidance’. Taxation is one way to address the negative externalities of platforms such as Facebook or to fund social goods such as independent news.
