The Internet Value Chain and The Digital Economy: Insight and Guidance on Digital Economy Policy and Regulation

Digitalising economies has consequences: ranging from Big Tech competition risks, cybercrime, harmful online content, fake news and disinformation, to social media amplification algorithms, and much more.

The digital economy is increasingly a part of our world, presenting new challenges for regulators and policy-makers.

This book explores, in-depth, the key policy considerations for the digital economy and offers recommendations on potential solutions for policy makers and regulators to help develop a balanced, efficient, and coordinated approach in regulating a complex environment.

Beginning with an introduction to the Internet Value Chain (IVC) and its economic impacts, the author provides structure and characterisation of the positive and negative externalities, the latter in terms of their risks and harms, considering how these need to be controlled or regulated.

The regulatory principles and best practices we need to consider in the digital economy are defined using a combination of the current offline telecoms, media & technology challenges and new Big Tech risks and harms, along with the numerous online issues arising from the IVC.

The supplementary section of this volume identifies many thematic challenging areas of the digital economy problem statement, defines them more granularly and make some brief recommendations on what, where and how digital economy policy-makers can start addressing them.

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in internet regulation or digital economy policy. In addition, it will be helpful for those involved in designing policies, regulations, research programmes or strategies related to these subjects.

The challenging new Digital Economy areas covered in depth:

Offline TMT/ICT

Digital Economy Platforms

Future of Content, Broadcasting and Media Regulation

Online Content Harms

Big Tech Regulation

Cybercrime

Cybersecurity

AI and Big Data

Privacy

Data Protection

Electronic Commerce

Over-The-Top (OTT) Regulation

Digital Economy Capacity Building

This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in internet regulation or digital economy policy. In addition, it will be helpful for those involved in designing policies, regulations, research programmes or strategies related to these subjects.