The Future of Platform Supervision: On the Implementation of the DSA in Germany (Part I)

Dr. Tobias Schmid is Director of the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia (LFM NRW), European Commissioner of the Conference of Directors of the State Media Authorities (DLM) and board member of the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA). Since 1 April 2021, he has also been a member of the Committee of Experts on Communication and Information of the German Commission for UNESCO. Tobias Schmid was Chair of ERGA from 2020 to 2022. He was Head of Media Policy at Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland from 2005 to 2016 and Executive Vice President Governmental Affairs at the RTL Group from September 2010 to December 2016. In addition, the doctor of law was also involved in the Association of Private Broadcasting and Telemedia (today: VAUNET), from November 2012 to September 2016 as chairman of the board.

Wolfgang Schulz is Director of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research │ Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) and holds the university professorship “Media Law and Public Law including its Theoretical Foundations” at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hamburg. Since February 2012, he has been Research Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). His work emphasises the freedom of communication, problems of legal regulation with regard to media contents, questions of law in new media, above all in digital television, and the legal bases of journalism, but also the jurisprudential bases of freedom of communication and the implications of the changing public sphere on law.

About the Insights and Power conversation series

A key challenge to good platform governance is the existence of knowledge asymmetries between governance actors. Platforms, scientists, civil society, regulators all know different things and have different perspectives on key elements like socio-technical platform architectures, incentive structures, norm production systems, algorithmic tools, and user behaviour.

Therefore “Insights and Power: Internet Scientists meet Decision-Makers” is a series of workshops and public-facing events that put key internet scientists in conversation with platform leaders. Together they will enquire what action knowledge is essential for impact-oriented platform research, how knowledge transfer to platforms and regulators can happen and how cross-disciplinary, international platform research can succesfully be financed and conducted. In light of the growing body of research on how platforms develop rules, and how public values should be integrated into private orders, three Kantian questions remain for platform governance research and practice: What can scientists know? What should platforms do? What can governments hope for?

The Conversation Series is organised by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut and the Global Network for Internet and Society Research Centres, uniting more than 100 research centers of excellence on internet and society. HBI has recently established a Private Ordering Observatory, a Digital Disinformation Hub and a Social Media Observatory. HIIG has recently established the Platform Governance Archive.