Internet - platforms - regulation : coordination of markets and curation of sociality

The leading Internet groups, with their extensively networked platforms, have become the key players in the design and regulatory framing of the Internet in the course of the 2010s. This paper examines the mechanisms by which they fulfil their role as structurebuilding, rule-making and action-coordinating core actors in today's Web. The focus is on two essential regulatory areas: on the one hand, the private-sector organization and regulation of markets, in which they themselves, as platform operators, coordinate mar- ket processes and determine the conditions of competition; on the other hand, the tech- nically mediated structuring and curation of social relationships and social behavior, through which the platform operators assume far-reaching social ordering and regula- tory functions. The few large platforms that today enable and coordinate large parts of private and public life on the Internet can-according to the thesis of this article-be understood as differentiated societal structures with a distinct institutional basis, which the platform operators shape and control to a considerable extent by means of their own rules, regulations and coordination bodies-up to the performance of quasi-sovereign tasks by the companies, which were previously reserved for state authorities and have so far largely been able to elude democratic legitimation and control.