SMU Law Review Volume 72 Issue 1 Article 9 2019 Global Platform Governance: Private Power in the Shadow of the State Hannah Bloch-Wehba Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr Part of the First Amendment Commons, and the Internet Law Commons Recommended Citation Hannah Bloch-Wehba, Global Platform Governance: Private Power in the Shadow of the State, 72 SMU L. REV. 27 (2019) https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol72/iss1/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at SMU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in SMU Law Review by an authorized administrator of SMU Scholar. For more information, please visit http://digitalrepository.smu.edu. GLOBAL PLATFORM GOVERNANCE: PRIVATE POWER IN THE SHADOW OF THE STATE Hannah Bloch-Wehba* ABSTRACT Online intermediaries—search engines, social media platforms, even e- commerce businesses—are increasingly required to make critical decisions about free expression, individual privacy, and property rights under do- mestic law. These requirements arise in contexts that include the right to be forgotten, hate speech, “terrorist” speech, and copyright and intellectual property. At the same time, these disputes about online speech are increas- ingly borderless. Many laws targeting online speech and privacy are explic- itly extraterritorial in scope. Even when not, some courts have ruled that they have jurisdiction to enforce compliance on a global scale. And gov- ernments are also demanding that platforms remove content—on a global scale—that violates platforms’ terms of service, leading to the deletion of information that is legal in one jurisdiction and illegal in the next.