One of the key challenges of regulating internet platforms is international cooperation. This chapter offers some insights into platform responsibility reforms by relying on forty years of experience in regulating cross-border financial institutions. Internet platforms and cross-border banks have much in common from a regulatory perspective. They both operate in an interconnected global market that lacks a supranational regulatory framework. And they also tend to generate cross-border spillovers that are difficult to control. Harmful content and systemic risks – the two key regulatory challenges for platforms and banks, respectively – can be conceptualized as negative externalities.

One of the main lessons learned in regulating cross-border banks is that, under certain conditions, international regulatory cooperation is possible. We have witnessed that in the successful design and implementation of the Basel Accord – the global banking standard that regulates banks’ solvency and liquidity risks. In this chapter, I will analyze the conditions under which cooperation can ensue and what the history of the Basel Accord can teach to platform responsibility reforms. In the last part, I will discuss what can be done when cooperation is more challenging.

This chapter engages with the two main instruments resulting from the mandate of the UN Special Representative on BHR (SRSG) between 2005 and 2011, namely the UN Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework and the UN Guiding Principles on BHR (UNGPs). The UN Framework was published in 2008 and establishes the conceptual foundation upon which the UNGPs are built. The UNGPs, on the other hand, can be interpreted as the operationalization of the UN Framework. After distinguishing the SRSG's approach from the earlier UN Draft Norms, the chapter discusses the three pillars of the UN Framework and the UNGPs, consisting of the state duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and access to remedy. Subsequently, it engages in a critical assessment of the UNGPs, outlining both the key achievements and the main criticism of the UNGPs. Such criticism aims at the principled pragmatism underlying the UNGPs, the foundational role of social expectations, the UNGPs’ lack of enforcement, and the distribution of responsibility between government and companies.