We once thought of cyberspace as a borderless world. As the internet has become increasingly platformized, with a small number of technology giants that dominate the global digital economy, concerns about information monopolies, hateful online content, and the impact on media content creators and creative industries have become more marked. Consequently governments, politicians, and civil society are questioning how digital platforms can or should be regulated. In this up-to-the-minute study, Terry Flew engages with important questions surrounding platform regulation. Starting from the premise that governance is an inherent feature of digital platforms, he argues that the challenge is to develop the best frameworks for balancing external regulatory oversight with the internal governance practices of platform companies. The intersection of media policy, information policy, and economic policy is an important element of policy frameworks, as national authorities increasingly seek to engage with the power of global digital platforms. Lively and accessible, Regulating Platforms is a go-to text for students and scholars of media and communication.

How are users influenced by social media platforms when they generate content, and does this influence affect users’ compliance with copyright laws? These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analysing how the behaviours of social media users are regulated from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan, an internet governance specialist, compares copyright laws on selected social media platforms, namely Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, with other regulatory factors such as the terms of service and the technological features of each platform. This comparison enables her to explore how each platform affects the role copyright laws play in securing compliance from their users. Through a case study detailing the content generative activities undertaken by a hypothetical user named Jane Doe, as well as drawing from empirical studies, the book argues that – in spite of copyright’s purported regulation of certain behaviours – users are 'nudged' by the social media platforms themselves to behave in ways that may be inconsistent with copyright laws. Praise for Regulating Content on Social Media 'This book makes an important contribution to the field of social media and copyright. It tackles the real issue of how social media is designed to encourage users to engage in generative practices, in a sense effectively “seducing” users into practices that involve misuse or infringement of copyright, whilst simultaneously normalising such practices.’ Melissa de Zwart, Dean of Law, Adelaide Law School, Australia "This timely and accessible book examines the regulation of content generative activities across five popular social media platforms – Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia. Its in-depth, critical and comparative analysis of the platforms' growing efforts to align terms of service and technological features with copyright law should be of great interest to anyone studying the interplay of law and new media." Peter K. Yu, Director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property, Texas A&M University

Cutting through the confusion around the nature and implications of digitalization, this book explores the rise of the new digital networks, how they affect traditional infrastructure, and how they will eventually need to be regulated. The authors examine how digitalization affects infrastructures in telecommunications, transport, and energy, and how digital platforms establish themselves as a new network on top of and in addition to traditional ones. Complex concepts are introduced through short and colorful stories about the founders of the most popular platforms (Google, Facebook, Skype, Uber, etc.) and how they grew to positions of power, drawing parallels with century-old traditional network industries’ monopoly power (AT&T, General Electric, etc.). The authors argue that these digital platforms strongly interfere with traditional infrastructures that are heavily regulated and provide essential services for society – meaning that digital platforms should be considered as a new and much more powerful type of infrastructure and will require regulation accordingly. A global audience of policy makers, public authorities, consultants, lawyers, students, and academics, as well as anyone with an interest in these digital platforms, will find this book enlightening and essential reading.

This book analyses novel and important issues relating to the emergence of new forms of work resulting from the introduction of disruptive technologies in the enterprises and the labour market, especially platform work. The first part of the book examines the platform economy and labour market, to address the more general challenges that the recent labour platforms pose for employment and the labour market, while the second part of the book considers the implications of the rise of different ways of work in the enterprises due to the incorporation of technology in a global context. Providing a rich analysis and evaluation of the numerous theoretical and practical regulatory problems arising from constantly developing technology, this book makes important and informed suggestions on how to solve the numerous problems which have arisen. The collection of chapters in this volume are varied and are dealt with from different disciplinary angles, and from a diverse range of countries and legal systems to create an interesting and unique global picture on the topics studied therein. With an international perspective, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of economy and technology law.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce transactions, including social commerce, are rapidly expanding, although e-commerce is still small when compared to traditional business transactions. As the familiarity of making purchases using smart devices continues to expand, many global and regional investors hope to target the ASEAN region to tap into the rising digital market in this region. The Handbook of Research on Innovation and Development of E-Commerce and E-Business in ASEAN is an essential reference source that discusses economics, marketing strategies, and mobile payment systems, as well as digital marketplaces, communication technologies, and social technologies utilized for business purposes. Featuring research on topics such as business culture, mobile technology, and consumer satisfaction, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, financial managers, business professionals, academicians, students, and researchers.

Controversy shrouds sharing economy platforms. It stems partially from the platforms’ economic impact, which is felt most acutely in certain sectors: Uber drivers compete with taxi drivers; Airbnb hosts compete with hotels. Other consequences lie elsewhere: Uber is associated with a trend toward low-paying, precarious work, whereas Airbnb is accused of exacerbating real estate speculation and raising the cost of long-term rental housing. While governments in some jurisdictions have attempted to rein in the platforms, technology has enabled such companies to bypass conventional regulatory categories, generating accusations of “unfair competition” as well as debates about the merits of existing regulatory regimes. Indeed, the platforms blur a number of familiar distinctions, including personal versus commercial activity; infrastructure versus content; contractual autonomy versus hierarchical control. These ambiguities can stymie legal regimes that rely on these distinctions as organizing principles, including those relating to labour, competition, tax, insurance, information, the prohibition of discrimination, as well as specialized sectoral regulation. This book is organized around five themes: technologies of regulation; regulating technology; the sites of regulation (local to global); regulating markets; and regulating labour. Together, the chapters offer a rich variety of insights on the regulation of the sharing economy, both in terms of the traditional areas of law they bring to bear, and the theoretical perspectives that inform their analysis. Published in English.

The world is in the midst of a social media paradigm. Once viewed as trivial and peripheral, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and WeChat have become an important part of the information and communication infrastructure of society. They are bound up with business and politics as well as everyday life, work, and personal relationships. This international Handbook addresses the most significant research themes, methodological approaches and debates in the study of social media. It contains substantial chapters written especially for this book by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, covering everything from computational social science to sexual self-expression. Part 1: Histories And Pre-Histories Part 2: Approaches And Methods Part 3: Platforms, Technologies And Business Models Part 4: Cultures And Practices Part 5: Social And Economic Domains