Saving the Internet: When is Outside Lobbying by Digital Platforms Successful?

Platform power was recently identified as a new type of business power. Rooted in the infrastructural role of digital intermediaries, it operates through an alignment of preferences between users and platforms: Policymakers, anticipating a public outcry of users who fear restrictions of services that form the backbone of their activities, shy away from regulation. However, assuming that aligned preferences largely automatically translate into political influence risks to repeat the neglect of agency by the traditional business power literature. How online platforms strategically mobilize users for political purposes and under what conditions this is successful, thus, requires further investigation. Drawing on research on outside lobbying, I argue that platforms have unique means to activate public support and signal electoral consequences to legislators. Unlike traditional interest groups which have to build and maintain channels to supporters, these channels are already built-in into the platform business model: Because of their intermediary position and ownership of networks, platforms have direct and frequent access to dependent users. This access allows them not only to disseminate information and coordinate political action but also to utilize their role as information gatekeepers to widen the group of supporters through framing. The field of intellectual property right reform is particularly interesting for investigating platform’s outside lobbying strategies because the lobbying tactics of different businesses can be observed: The advent of digital technologies pitted the interests of rightholders and platforms against each other as it raised the question of intermediary liability for the IP infringements of their users. To test the proposed mechanism and uncover its scope conditions, I use process-tracing and conduct a pairwise comparison between the deviant case of the EU Copyright Directive of 2019 and the typical case of the US Stop Online Piracy Act of 2012 (SOPA). In addition to collecting data through interviews with relevant actors, a quantitative text analysis is conducted to track the spread of frames and the networks that emerged around them. To do so, a dictionary is built from platforms’ and rightholders’ public statements on the legislation and applied to a corpus of newspaper articles and tweets. My preliminary findings show that platforms successfully raised the salience of SOPA and reframed the debate by blacking out their websites behind censorship banners. By redirecting users to e-mail forms, they also encouraged users to signal their discontent to representatives who, in turn, responded by retracting their support for the act. Contrarily, the Copyright Directive passed despite also proposing increased intermediary liability and similar attempts by platforms to mobilize users. Potential breaking points for the mechanism in the EU are the legislators’ insulation from public pressure or the failure of platforms’ frames to spread sufficiently due to nationalized issue publics. Studying how and when platforms use outside lobbying successfully sheds light on one of their tactics currently employed in regulatory battles around the world. Further research can draw on this by investigating the interactions between platform’s inside and outside lobbying strategies.