After the techlash

Abstract

Regulation—The very idea In 2018, the Economist newspaper identified a ‘techlash’ that was holding Big Tech responsible for multiple imbalances and inadequacies of local and global communication systems (Economist, 2018). The immediate background was intensifying public and policy debate in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelation of massive online surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency, the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal revealing Facebook’s involvement in the monetization of personal information and its recycling for political gain, and other instances of whistleblowing exposing abuses of power in and by communication (Di Salvo, 2022). In a slightly longer historical perspective, the techlash was responding to a new category of critical infrastructure that had become entrenched in less than two decades: the internet as configured by the Big Five platforms (Alphabet [Google], Amazon, Apple, Meta [Facebook], and Microsoft). The two books I review here together offer knowledgeable and balanced guidance—in the complementary genres of textbook systematics and essayistic reflections—for readers to understand how the ‘platformization’ of the internet came about in the first place, and to reflect further on what might be the sequel to platformization. What comes after the techlash is still an open question, subject to geopolitical contestations and scholarly interventions imagining what the internet could become, beyond cycles of tech utopias and dystopias since the 1990s. The common theme of the two volumes is regulation and its constituents: Who should regulate digital platforms—the platforms themselves, communities of users, political authorities, or some public-private partnership—and what is to be regulated: technical standards, business models, freedoms of information and communication? The subtitle of the essay Review Essay