Comparative Media Regulation in the United States and Europe

Abstract

In current debates over the Internet’s impact on global democracy, the prospect of state regulation of social media has been proffered as a solution to problems like fake news, hate speech, conspiracy-mongering, and similar ills. For example, US Senator Mark Warner has proposed a bill that would enhance privacy protections required of internet platforms, create rules for labeling bot accounts, and change the legal terms of the platforms’ legal relationship with their users. In Europe, regulation has already been enacted in the form of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and new laws like the Network Enforcement Law (NetzDG). This chapter will survey this rapidly developing field, putting current efforts of liberal democracies to regulate internet content in the broader perspective of legacy media regulation. As we will see, there are very different national approaches to this issue among contemporary liberal democracies, and in many respects the new internet regulations, actual and proposed, are extensions of existing practices. We conclude that, in the US case, content regulation will be very difficult to achieve politically and that antitrust should be considered as an alternative. Media regulation is a sensitive and controversial topic in all liberal democracies. The US Constitution’s First Amendment protects freedom of speech, while media freedom is guaranteed in various legal instruments governing the European Union and the Council of Europe, as well as in the European Convention on Human Rights. Freedom of speech is normatively regarded as critical to the proper functioning of a liberal democracy, and the