Meta-Regulation--An Innovative and Dynamic Policy Instrument for Platform Economy

Abstract

The emergence of a variety of digital companies breaks up the competitive landscape of the market, which simultaneously changes peoples lifestyles as well. As the main tool to convenient peoples lives and to motivate the economic development of society, the progress made by digital technology proposed high requirements for authorities to update and adopt new regulatory approaches to retain the market order. Currently, the policy regulation for online agencies, known as platforms, causes intense academic discussion due to the inapplicability of the traditional regulatory model and the conflicting views of technical innovation or governmental restriction. This paper will focus on an innovative regulatory doctrine, namely Meta-regulation which enables the government to set up the rules for platforms from a unique perspective, and meanwhile, exploring two dimensions including an explanation of the standardized concept of Meta-regulation and giving an analysis of its generalization within the context of the digital economy. A conceptually accepted definition of Meta-Regulation and a series of reasons produced to demonstrate the applicability of Meta-Regulation for platform regulating will be figured out at the end of this paper.