Georgetown Law
Technology Review

In December 2017, under the Trump administration, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission) repealed its 2015 network neutrality rules and abdicated its role to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. This widely criticized decision, coupled with the enormous and growing power of online platform companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet’s Google, raised […]

Zero-rated services provide an on-ramp to networked resources that are otherwise beyond many users’ reach. Through such services, wireless service providers offer free access to a curated set of popular applications on the public Internet. Its proponents assert that zero-rated services provide an invaluable introduction to online applications and content, which, in turn, will increase […]

Platform regulation has become the cause celebre of technology regulation: a call to regulate the intermediaries who provide platforms for networked digital services. These include the GAFA giants: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Many policy entrepreneurs are peddling solutions as the policy cycle turns, in a classic Kingdon case of “solutions chasing a problem.” Yet networks are not […]

In 1986, science and technology studies scholar Langdon Winner wrote, “The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts.” To that list, we might add the […]

The metaphor of the marketplace of ideas is under siege with its detractors pointing to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites as proof positive that the model is no longer operative. The surprising outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the concomitant focus on the scourge of “fake news” have placed Internet platforms at the center of […]

From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, 2017 was a banner year for platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, the press, and some members of the public—ramped up restrictions on speech by adding new rules, adjusting their still-hidden algorithms, and hiring more staff to moderate content. They […]

Backpage is a classifieds hub that hosts “80 percent of the online advertising for illegal commercial sex in the United States.”This is not by happenstance but rather by design. Evidence suggests that the advertising hub selectively removed postings discouraging sex trafficking. The site also tailored its rules to protect the practice from detection, including allowing […]

In 2017, Peter Daou launched “Verrit,” a partisan news site targeted to Democratic voters disappointed with the results of the 2016 election. The site consists of single quotations, facts, and statistics, each formatted as a graphic and labeled with a unique “identification code” to indicate authenticity and accuracy. For instance, a Verrit article titled “Where […]

Election meddling, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, and the potential manipulation of platform users is provoking intense reactions to technology around the world. The outrage following news reports that the data of millions of people were used without their knowledge to train sophisticated targeting tools that may have manipulated voters suggests that consumers expectations of how their data […]

In the absence of a technology-focused regulator, diverse administrative agencies have been forced to develop regulatory models for governing their sphere of the data economy. These largely uncoordinated efforts offer a laboratory of regulatory experimentation on governance architecture. This symposium essay explores what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has done in its first several […]