Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article builds upon the literature on regulatory intermediation to answer how and why European rule‐makers rely on data protection officers (DPOs) to shape the self‐regulation of private and public organizations regarding the processing of personal information. Based on the theory‐testing process‐tracing methodology, the article finds that while the old data protection regime (1995–2016) allowed national rule‐makers to pursue their preferred policy paths regarding the regulation of DPOs, this is not the case for the new data protection regime (from 2016). The article argues that a combination of two causal mechanisms—supranational and functional—has led European rule‐takers to institutionalize the designation of DPOs within broad categories of regulated organizations to motivate credibility toward data protection. The article concludes that while this policy decision enhances the self‐regulation capabilities of rule‐takers with the professional accountability and expertise of DPOs, European politics have made the reliance on DPOs more susceptible to the short‐term interests of rule‐takers.

Content regulation on digital platforms has become a contested issue on the public and scholarly agendas. To understand how digital platform providers experiment with making commitments regarding their regulation, this article process-traces Facebook's content regulation to ask how it self-regulates despite constant pressures for policy intervention. The first part of the article shows how Facebook moved from its initial "thin" self-regulatory regime toward what I call "enhanced self-regulation," which relies on first-party and independent third-party intermediaries. Thereafter, I show how Facebook self-regulated the balance between public and private interests over time and across the regimes. The findings suggest that powerful actors such as Facebook can innovate in self-regulation by reallocating content-related responsibilities to intermediaries and subsequently create polycentric governance regimes. Lessons about how self-regulators that face public criticism can make more credible commitments to public interests are then drawn from the strengths and weakness of enhanced self-regulation.