The Complicated Influences Affecting Contemporary Internet Governance

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a paper by Terry Flew, Agata Stepnik, and Tim Koskie, who begin by noting the changing contours of Internet governance. There is increasing nation-state regulation in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states, as well as renewed debate about the treatment of digital and social media platforms and a populist push towards greater regulation.

This regulatory turn has also been driven by significant shocks and scandals as well as growing regulatory activism, and is often directed at curbing the power of platforms, out of a general sense that governments should “do something”. The question is whether this should be done through conventional media regulation authorities, new authorities like the Australian eSafety Commissioner, or some other mechanism; this also relates to our evolving and as yet incomplete and immature understanding of the digital mediasphere.

Political populism has also pushed back against the idea that the best response to complex new environments is to do nothing; instead, there is a strong demand to rein in ‘Big Tech’ and address the various ills that have been claimed for digital media. Much of this happens at the level of nation states, in the absence of workable transnational frameworks.

This presentation further addresses this through a review of 65 recent Australian opinion polls exploring public views on regulating social media; 30 of these alone were from 2024. Most Australians supported greater regulation, including bans for specific users and criminalising specific actions of content; restrictions for general usage affecting particular groups were especially strongly supported, while more complex questions attracted less explicit support.

Questions posed especially highlighted issues of safety and security; tested support for specific proposed solutions; and related predominantly to platform accountability and bans (rather than end user accountability and bans).

Meanwhile, the recent Australian Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society attracted a substantial number of submissions from individuals, companies, researchers, state actors, and industry; safety and security were especially central to submissions, while the much smaller number of news media sustainability submissions generated outsized coverage in the Committee’s reports.

Internet governance has conventionally decentred both the state and the Internet, then, and there is plenty of activity which is not necessarily always visible to the outside public; it is also difficult for nation states against non-compliance, especially when tech broligarchs are now very much in power as part of the incoming Trump II administration in the United States. In an age of distrust, there is now a struggle between a push for technocratic governance and a push for populist solutions, in this area of regulation as much as in others.