Over the past 2 decades, Digital Platforms (DPs), including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, have risen from insignificant start- ups to a dominating set of firms with a combined 4 trillion dollar market capitalisation1. These now ubiquitous DPs have revolutionised many aspects of everyday life, from working and studying to communicating and dating. In recognition of this unprecedented rise of commercial power, legal and academic scholarship has begun to revisit the concepts of monopolistic market behaviours and the subsequent potential for both economic and political influence.
Presently, several core schools of thought have emerged in order to tackle the rising challenge of platform power. In the policy space, initiatives such as the Stigler Committee lead by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business have identified a wealth of problematic consequences that are a direct result of the lack of competition enforced within the technology industry. These range from the withholding of market power over online advertising space, to the dangers of combining market power with the exploitation of existing behavioural biases in users2.
In legal and economic academia, an emerging wave of Neo-Braindeisian scholarship, led by the likes of White House Counsel & Columbia law professor Tim Wu, seeks to resurrect the anti-trust approaches of the early 20th century pioneered by Louis Brandeis in order to enforce stricter market regulation in contemporary socio-economic settings. In the technological space, calls for technology-focussed approaches to diffusing platform power include proposals such as telecoms network-style interoperability3 and increased algorithmic and dataset transparency (including former Co- Lead of Ethical Artificial Intelligence at Google, Timnit Gebru’s proposal for datasheets for datasets4).
1.1 The Challenge of Curation at Scale
Present approaches to online content curation at scale, such as black-box moderation and ambiguous platform community guidelines are a growing area of concern for a broad group of stakeholders. The mass centralised curation and moderation approaches of mainstream social media platforms are becoming increasingly scrutinised in both legal and sociological literature, and are often linked to problematic phenomena such as ‘content cartels’5, the amplification of misinformation and political polarisation6. Current algorithms
that curate and moderate content online are typically considered as ‘one size fits all’, and as such, can exhibit technological vulnerabilities that can be exploited, and in particular, can lead to siloed and ultimately dangerous differences in online experiences.
Presently, platforms often manage moderation and curation processes through an individualistic approach, which is a somewhat nascent ideology in wider literature that has been addressed briefly and conceptually by moderation experts such as Prof. Tarleton Gillespie of the Cornell Communications Department (Custodians of the Internet7). Generally, the few references to solutions are brief and often idealistic; aiming to provoke thought and discussion as opposed to proposing tangible and implementation-ready solutions.
1.2 Introducing Middleware
One recent and widely discussed solution to the problem of at-scale content curation is that of middleware. The term has been used historically in computer science and hardware engineering, and in 2021 was re-purposed by leading Political Scientist Dr. Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University to refer to a technology- based solution that aims to take the editorial power from the small concentration of dominating technology firms, and re-allocate this to a ‘diverse group of competitive firms’ offering a user-tailored experience8.
Although the idea has gathered significant momentum in academic discussion, the proposal for middleware is currently focussed upon the potential sociological and political upsides of the concept, with lesser focus placed on the feasibility of implementation and it’s effectiveness in addressing the fundamental online harms associated with content curation at scale. This paper thus aimed to examine the feasibility of middleware as a technological solution through exploring the following research questions:
• What are the core arguments against the feasibility of middleware as a solution to anti-competitive platform behaviours?
• How might a middleware solution work in practise, and what considerations would be required in order to implement such a solution?
• What are the current or potential technical models by which middleware could exist in practise?