The Return of the Regulatory State: Nation-States as Policy Actors in Digital Platform Governance

This chapter tracks the evolution of Internet governance from the “open Internet” discourses of the 1990s towards the current “policy turn”, and the growing regulatory activism of nation-states in addressing questions around the economic, political and communications power of digital platform companies. It observes that this occurs in a context of a shift in the politics of political parties of the right towards “Big State” populism, a crisis of liberalism as a dominant policy discourse, and demands in liberal democracies towards greater regulation of digital platforms. This in turn points towards a misalignment between the regulatory activism of nation-states and international Internet governance frameworks, which tend to be premised upon multistakeholder governance and a minimal role for nation-state governments.