Formal opinion · 2014
Neutralité des plateformes
[Platform neutrality: creating the conditions for an open and sustainable digital environment — Conseil national du numérique (French national digital council) opinion, 2014]
Opinion proposing to extend the principle of neutrality beyond networks, to the platforms that structure access to information and services.
The concept has been vindicated by events. In 2014, the opinion proposed extending the neutrality requirement beyond networks, to platforms that had become mandatory gateways to information and services. Eight years later, the Digital Markets Act imposes access and non-discrimination obligations on gatekeepers, the same idea, fitted with a legal apparatus.
One has to resist the temptation to claim credit for this. These analyses were circulating at the time in several academic and regulatory circles across Europe, and I have no trace of any direct influence of this opinion on the preparatory work in Brussels. Convergence is more likely than filiation.
The real lesson concerns the level of action, not the diagnosis. The opinion was addressed to a French Prime Minister, on a subject where the national level had no purchase at all: no obligation imposed by France alone on major structuring platforms would have been enforceable, and later attempts confirmed as much. We had the right concept and the wrong addressee. This error of level recurs across several pieces of work from this period (Digital Ambition offers another example, on the platform rating agency), and it deserves naming: producing national opinions on transnational objects absorbed a share of French public energy through the 2010s.
On video
"Confiance à l'ère des plateformes - quelles garanties?" (Trust in the age of platforms: what guarantees?), Conseil national du numérique (in French).