Over the past two decades, online services have transformed our economy and culture, but they have also spawned significant social and economic harms. They should be regulated democratically to promote development and to curb predatory behavior. To do so, they need clearer price transparency, robust privacy protections, and new investigatory powers that can uncover problems like algorithmic amplification of harmful speech or bias in machine-learning programs. Achieving these goals requires aggressive antitrust action, updated competition policies, and a robust set of federal internet laws and rules.
This proposal lays out commonsense ideas that will enable effective democratic regulation of online services in the future. The first tier is designed to protect online infrastructure, imposing public interest obligations such as common carriage—a requirement to deal fairly and equitably with all legal customers—and nondiscrimination. It also establishes greater regulatory stability and dedicated intermediary liability protections separate from Section 230 in the event that that law is changed.
A second tier is designed to regulate all other online services entities. It prioritizes competition, civil rights, consumer protection, and data privacy, operationalized through dedicated statutes with rule-making capabilities guided by specific principles, as well as clear, per se violations of rules that can be enforced by regulators. It also establishes a process requirement for considering information diversity and pluralism, equitable growth, and representation of all participants in multisided markets. A third tier is modeled on the concept of systematically important financial institutions, with special oversight responsibilities and the ability to administer tailored remedies and sanctions for systemic risk.