Media platformization has caused problems that a state cannot easily regulate. The media content regulations considered in Chapter 4 are prime examples demonstrating the need to alter the power distribution in the Internet ecosystem. In terms of speech platforms, the “rules-based” platform governance model led by the EU, such as the DSA, now represents a strong power in balancing the US’ CDA-based social media self-regulation. The years to come will be critical to the global governance of digital platforms. Key indicators include whether more and more countries will adopt DSA-like regulations along the EU regulatory path. In terms of streaming services, the content quotas for video streaming platforms may constitute performance requirements for investment in services. This measure may also violate the obligations that apply to the nondiscriminatory treatment of digital products. Looking ahead, cultural diversity concerns regarding avatars in the VR space will be even more complex and will propel the “trade v. culture” clash to another level. No matter how carefully crafted, media content regulation must face enforceable reality. Trade rules that ban local presence would enable platform companies to supply services without establishing a local presence, which could significantly constrain a state’s ability to enforce platform regulations.

The chapter historicises the economics of music in the current age of technological automation – from the invention of intellectual property to the implementation of lock-down technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first section sketches the basic characteristics of music’s technological, legal and political economies. By the late twentieth century, the precarious markets for music – enclosed within large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the nineteenth century – had morphed into a relatively stable set of intersecting industrial networks, including print, radio and phonograph. The second section sketches a transition period for the music industry in the context of distributed digital networks that emerged after the Cold War, producing a disjuncture between practice and policy. The third section traces the dialectics of intellectual property regimes pertaining to digital rights management, arguing that a covert allomorphism of the law effectively disabled both technical and legal functionalities pertaining to music.