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Regulating Recommending: Motivations, Considerations, and Principles

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Singh, Jatinder 

Abstract

Internet regulation and 'online harms' are matters of much political and regulatory attention. This debate is beset by issues, including defining 'online harms', respecting freedom of expression, and others. While much of this debate has focused on content hosted by online platforms, comparatively little attention has been paid to the central role of algorithmic personalisation - or ' recommending ' - by platforms in content dissemination in online environments and the problems to which this contributes. Focusing on recommender systems, i.e. the mechanism by which content is recommended by platforms, provides an alternative regulatory approach that avoids many of the pitfalls with addressing the hosting of content itself. This paper therefore explores motivations and considerations for regulating the use of recommender systems by online platforms. In doing so, this paper establishes a typology of online recommending, sets out various problems and consequences of recommending, and argues that recommending content is not one of the three activities for which information society service providers are afforded liability protections under the E-Commerce Directive. To address the identified problems and fill this legal gap, this paper proposes some principles for future regulation, and discusses approaches to oversight and compliance that could work with these principles.

Description

Keywords

Internet Regulation; Platform Responsibility; Intermediary Liability; E-Commerce Directive; Recommender Systems

Journal Title

SSRN Electronic Journal

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2042-115X
1556-5068

Volume Title

10

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Rights

Publisher's own licence
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P024394/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R033501/1)
We acknowledge the financial support of the University of Cambridge (through the Cambridge Trust & Technology Initiative), the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/P024394/1, EP/R033501/1], and Microsoft (through the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre)