Just published in The Globe and Mail. Yes, the headline (which I didn’t write) goes hard, but it’s not wrong. So much of our years-long Canadian platform-regulation debate has involved regulation proponents defending the basic premise that platform regulation (and internet regulation — the two are often conflated) itself is legitimate, and not a totalitarian plot to censor free speech and steal your freedoms.

As I note in the article, although many of these arguments are presented as if from a novel, free speech-focused cyberlibertarian perspective, in reality they’re little different from anti-regulation free market fundamentalism that’s as old as the hills. At the heart of almost all of the anti-platform-regulation critiques is the idea that the free market should be left to decide all, whether it’s the fate of Canada’s cultural industries (Bill C-11), Canadian news media (Bill C-18) or the Canadian social fabric (Bill C-63).

Which is why the formal, legal finding that Google is a search monopoly is so clarifying. Because when you have a monopoly, the question isn’t should we regulate, but how should we regulate?

For the past five-plus years, I’ve been trying to make the argument that platforms are consequential regulators: they aspire to set the rules by which other play. That’s what it means to be a platform. They’re not normal market players facing (potentially overreaching) government regulation. They are government rivals who want to displace government rule-setting with their own. The choice was never between government regulation and the free market. It’s between accountable, democratic government regulation and regulation by autocratic, unaccountable, profit-driven, self-interested foreign companies.

In retrospect, perhaps I should’ve simply gone straight to the truth that platforms are merely monopolists or aspiring monopolists. Monopolists, left unregulated, enjoy enormous leeway to abuse their customers in their own interest, subject only to how much their users need their services: the more essential they are, the harder it is for users to go without. Which allows them to set self-interested rules of the game for their users. IOW, they’re consequential regulators.

It is much easier to make the regulation argument for monopolies than it is for platforms even when they’re pretty much the same thing. That’s because we already have an accepted language to understand them, and a set of agreed-upon remedies. Monopolies lead to bad consumer outcomes, particularly higher prices or, equivalently, worse service. They’re evidence of a market failure. And market failures require government intervention to fix.

Which is what the federal government has been trying to do all along. Not perfectly, and I’ve never seen a government so incapable of explaining even its good decisions. But when the gang on the other side of the aisle is screaming, “Freedom!” and “Censorship!” and “Authoritarianism!,” credit is due for pushing forward in the appropriate direction.

If anything, the government has been too deferential to these companies, bending over backward to ensure that they don’t interfere too much with their internal workings. I addressed this issue with respect to the proposed online harms legislation.

It would be nice if the US court ruling would lead the more unequivocal opponents of the government’s regulatory agenda to reconsider their stance. Addressing market failures is something that anyone who understands economics should be able to get behind.

Imagine, the anti-regulation argument now neutered, a renewed, more productive conversation about what platform regulation should look like. As I suggest at the end of the article, it would be great if this debate recognized the public-utility nature of these companies. There’s a reason why people have stuck with Facebook even though corporate censorship has reduced them to using screenshots of media URLs to communicate with their friends. This is the kind of thing you do when you have no choice but to use a service.

I would love to see a debate that pits the government’s current minimalist approach versus a more maximalist, public utility view of platform regulation. Will it happen? Probably not at the moment, given the ideological bent of our current Official Opposition. But it’s a lovely Wednesday morning, and one can dream.

Enjoy this picture of Toronto.