Building the Digital Platform Commission: How To Design a Regulator

Authors Harold Feld and Lisa Macpherson argue for a dedicated federal digital regulator, a "Digital Platform Commission," to oversee large technology platforms, addressing gaps in existing antitrust and consumer-protection frameworks. The paper, developed out of a Public Knowledge policy convening, lays out design principles for such an agency, focusing on how it should be structured to promote competition among dominant platforms and safeguard consumers from platform-specific harms.

The paper does not present original empirical data; instead it works from legal and institutional-design analysis, drawing on precedents from existing regulatory bodies to propose oversight mechanisms tailored to the network effects, data control, and market power characteristic of dominant tech firms. It concludes that case-by-case antitrust enforcement is insufficient on its own and that a specialized regulator with ongoing rulemaking and enforcement authority is needed to keep pace with platform practices.