Collaborative Oversight: The Emergence of Digital Regulators Forums for Governing Domestic Digital Sectors

• Dana Louise Cramer
• PhD Candidate
• Toronto Metropolitan University and York University
• Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture

Abstract

Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia have all devised ‘digital regulators forums.’ These forums increase regulators’ capacity for evolving digital regulations by bringing competition, privacy, and communications regulators together to share insights, data, and policy approaches towards the regulation of online platforms. These forums have the capacity to make a quasi ‘whole of government’ approach to digital policy. As a governance innovation started by the UK in 2020, digital regulators forums are growing around the world. This essay analyzes the digital regulators forums as a governance innovation, and addresses their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for their success.

Introduction

Globally, countries are working to develop laws and regulatory capacities to offset concerns of a concentrated digital ecosystem (Flew, 2021). Since the commercialization of the Internet, large private sector players have found significant financial gains in our online world. Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Apple, Microsoft, and other large multi-national digital companies (e.g., Netflix, Snapchat, Pinterest, WeChat, TikTok) have benefitted from ‘network effects,’ control over data, and a resulting critical monopoly on intellectual property stemming from the broad data information these insights can wield for emerging technologies (Flyverbom et al., 2019). These large multi-national corporations which hold so much power over the digital sector tend to be referred to as ‘GAFAM+’ due to their large stock portfolio size and control over large swaths of the digital sector (Birkinbine et al., 2017). To counter this rising global concentration to few digital players with significant power stemming from control of users’ data, countries around the world have introduced new laws as a response. The European Union (EU) has been at the forefront with its General Data Protection Regulation (2018), Digital Service Act (2022) and Digital Markets Act (2022), along with other policies working to get ahead of the race for- and against-artificial intelligence (AI) among other initiatives (Bradford, 2023). By introducing these digital policies, other countries have followed suit (Bradford, 2012). Canada, on the other hand, has worked to protect domestic industries from reduced financial resources by creating policy schemes for financial remuneration to domestic audio-visual content players through the Online Streaming Act (2023) and the Online News Act (2023). These laws expanded the mandate of Canada’s communications regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), to include regulating online platforms like some of the GAFAM+ players. Regulating these online spaces, however, is complex as powers granted by one regulator might not be sufficient for broad regulatory leverage against online platforms to steer their continued market penetration in a way which is deemed suitable for the markets which they are active in. This suitability is often lamented as the ‘public interest.’ Additionally, regulating the digital economy can result in policy failures when a company that must comply with one country’s laws, will then shift the online experience on their platforms in that single country to the user experience in another country, resulting in a fragmentation of the Internet in that jurisdiction, also referred to as a ‘splinternet’ (Drake et al., 2016). An example of such fragmentation can be found in Canadian news not available on Meta-owned social media platforms following the introduction of the Online News Act. This leaves policymakers in a difficult position of trying to regulate the Internet environment in their jurisdiction in a way which sees what is deemed as a fairer digital environment, while also not potentially shrinking the digital economy in their borders. Additionally, for countries which have regulators which have clear mandates for certain areas of their country’s economy, this can be limiting when faced with online platforms which have business models which cross areas of competition, content, privacy, and intellectual property. In these scenarios, multiple regulators will be needed to overcome regulatory issues with a single problem facing digital policy.

This realization appears to have been made by a select group of countries. The United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, and Canada have all devised ‘digital regulators forums’ as a potential solution to this misdemeanour. These digital regulators forums have been propping up in countries to achieve this complex problem of how to achieve ‘whole of government’ regulation via independent regulators, while also ensuring that regulatory solutions will not splinter the Internet in a single jurisdiction. This essay will explore digital regulators forums and assess their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for achieving their goals of regulating the digital world in a way which meets the public interest. The essay analyzes public information about these digital regulators forums and assesses these against theories in governance and regulation. This essay will conclude with clear recommendations stemming from the analysis and discussion. This essay is shaped in four parts. Part 1 will include a literature review which analyzes regulation and governance theories to work as a theoretical framework in analyzing digital regulators forums. Part 2 describes the public history of the five mentioned digital regulators forums to contextualize them as a case study. Part 3 then includes an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for digital regulators forums to consider in their continued deployment by other countries, as well as the evolution of the existing digital regulators forums we see today. Part 4 includes the conclusion and a final section with clear recommendations synthesized from the analysis.

Regulation and Governance of the Digital Sector

Digital regulators forums are a complex case study to understand within theories of regulation and governance. Where regulation and governance might be conflated as similar terms, they differ in distinct ways. Governance is a broad concept. Where its prefix ‘govern’ matches that for ‘government,’ these two are not synonymous. Governance is not solely the work of governments but entangled with additional actors for the distribution of services (Peters, 2011). Bevir (2011) defines governance as “theories and issues related to social coordination and the nature of all patterns of rule. More specifically, governance refers to various new theories and practices of governing and the dilemmas to which they give rise” (p. 1). To this, governance recognizes complex processes with multiple actors interacting. Scholars note that in the last quarter of the 20th century and bridging into the 21st century, a shift from ‘governments’ to ‘governance’ occurred (Ansell & Torfing, 2016; Bevir, 2011). This paralleled globalization and similarly the rise of the public Internet. In this shift from governments to governance, governance networks develop to ensure stakeholders across economies behave in specified roles of their own accord. Examples of governance networks include transnational governance networks as a form of global policy frameworks (Slaughter & Hale, 2011), industry self-regulation networks, or ‘private regulation,’ to allow private sector stakeholders to govern themselves before a ‘hard governance’ tool such as regulation enforced by governments (Blomqvist, 2016; Cashore et al., 2021), and collaborative governance networks which is a form of governance where multiple stakeholders come together on a specific problem and work to fix this in their distinct stakeholder capacities (Ansell & Gash, 2008). With digital regulators forums including multiple regulators, they work as a governance network of government regulators.

Regulation, in comparison to governance, is one mode of broader governance. It stems from a history which recognizes the need for government agencies to correct market behaviour for the achievement of public interest outcomes (Levi-Faur et al., 2021). In recent decades, regulation as a governance tool has been utilized more than legislative means to plan and steer an economy (Döhler, 2011; Jordana & Levi-Faur, 2004; Mayntz, 2016). Steering is defined as the political intention to direct a particular social process or change across non-governmental actors (Mayntz, 2016). In this, governments can utilize regulations to steer actors towards what a given country deems as the public interest. The concept of the ‘public interest’ is vague and becomes the responsibility for regulators to work to achieve (Huntington, 1952). Public interest theory of regulation posits that regulation ought to seek the ‘protection and benefit of the public at large’ (Hantke-Domas, 2003). The idea of the public interest rests in the notion that actors (bureaucrats, politicians, industry), in their delivery of a service, have the capacity to become ‘captured’ and therefore effective ‘incentive structures’ are required in the governance process to ensure such actors will not limit the public’s choice in any way of services, thereby broadening the public’s interest and choices (Eriksson, 2016). Developing these incentive structures then rests with regulators in their formulation of regulations. These regulators are responsible for clearly identified sectors of the economy as their mandate and regulate in accordance with the powers which they are bestowed through other functions of government (i.e., acts passed by elected officials in democratic countries). Regulators do not have the purview to create regulations outside of their defined mandate, which such responsibilities would rest with a different regulator. In the case of digital regulators forums where multiple regulators across competition, privacy, communications, and intellectual property agencies come together, each of these regulators becomes responsible for developing incentive structures in their own regulatory purviews. It is in their collaborative approach, however, that they can govern the digital sector in unison as a governance network of regulators.

In the global digital sector, regulation has not been historically present. Since the public release and commercialization of the Internet, it had been recommended for governments to take a ‘hands off’ approach to the then-new information communication technologies (ICT) environment at the time and allow multiple stakeholders, in their distinctive roles, to carry out global governance functions of the Internet (Mueller, 2010). The goal of this was to allow the Internet to grow and for those who are actively involved in its growth to lead in what was identified as clear governance parameters surrounding its technical infrastructure (DeNardis, 2013). The Internet as an infrastructure, however, has been far-reaching and reshaped areas of government services, business delivery, communication and information environments, and overall coordination of various facets of daily life (Lotz, 2019). This becomes what Manuel Castells (2001) refers to as the ‘Internet galaxy,’ where the Internet has become the bedrock of our societies at large. This has led governments to rethink their governance roles within the digital sector and develop policies, regulations, and new regulators to create broad digital policies which are domestic to their jurisdictions and distinct from the global technical infrastructure of the Internet which continues to rest in global Internet governance arenas (Flew, 2021). In essence, governments are developing digital policies surrounding the evolution of digital transformations in their environments, where these transformations include areas like the shift from analogue to digital systems (e.g., broadcasting to online streaming), the ways information is consumed through new mediated online platforms (e.g., news consumption on Facebook) and the ill-effects of human interaction digitally transformed which can be referred to broadly as ‘online harms’ (Ndzendze, 2022). In reasserting governments in this digital governance space, they have expanded and adjusted mandates of existing regulators and proposed new regulators for the online space altogether. These regulators, however, become responsible in their narrow regulatory purviews to steer the digital transformations in a fairer way, which this limited scope can reduce their capacity to fully regulate the online space in the public interest. A solution to this can be found in entering governance networks.

Emergence of Digital Regulators Forums

Digital regulators forms are a recent governance innovation. The first digital regulators forum to begin this trend was the UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF), which was launched 1 July 2020. The purpose of the DRCF was to ensure the UK had regulatory coordination among regulators of the digital economy which was seen as a unique regulatory sector that pervaded any single regulator’s mandate (UK Competition and Markets Authority, 2020). The regulatory agencies to establish the DRCF included the Competition and Markets Authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, and Ofcom (the Office of Communications [the UK’s communications regulator]). Less than a year later in April 2021, the Financial Conduct Authority would join the DRCF. As the DRCF notes in its launch document, these regulators found it necessary to work together due to the complexity of regulating the digital sector and that it would be beneficial to combine their efforts in this space to create ‘coherent, informed, and responsive regulation’ together. These regulators had worked together since 2014 as part of the UK Regulators Network (UKRN); however, these regulators felt a ‘digital sector-specific’ regulatory forum was still necessary outside of the UKRN environment.

The DRCF idea made an international hop to the Netherlands the following year with the Dutch Digital Regulation Cooperation Platform (SDT). Like the DRCF, the SDT included the Dutch agencies responsible for competition, media regulation, data protection, and financial markets. In 2022, Ireland and Australia followed suit with the Digital Regulators Group (Ireland, no utilized acronym) and the Digital Platform Regulators Forum (DP-REG [Australia]) within similar objectives. Canada has been the most recent country in 2023 to formulate a digital regulators forum including similar regulators with the Canadian Digital Regulators Forum (CDRF). A list of the digital regulators forum, year of development, country affiliation, and affiliated departments can be found in Table 1.

Where these digital regulators forum offer similarities, they also differ. For instance, public learning about each digital regulators forum has varied levels of available documents for public reporting on the initiatives. The DRCF is the most transparent in their information with Ireland as the least. Some digital regulators forums have their own websites (UK and Australia) to publicly report on their initiative, whereas others might attempt to share information about themselves, but do so through hyperlinks affiliated with a specific regulator. This is the case of Canada (Competition Bureau’s website) and the Netherlands (Authority for Consumers and Markets). Additionally, some digital regulators forums have libraries of data and reports for review, whereas others do not, however this could be due to their recent nature and capacity building of creating such documentation to share with the public. Overall, there is not a standardized process for digital regulators form or how they contribute to the public interest either through open information sharing or a coordinated regulatory action (at the time of research, no joint regulation by a digital regulators forum had occurred).

Although digital regulators forums have yet to demonstrate a significant coordinated regulatory output, they have attempted to make global impact. In June 2023—around the same time that the CDRF was launched—digital regulators forums created a joint international digital regulators forum of themselves. This became titled the International Network for Digital Regulation Cooperation (INDRC). INDRC states that their objective to form was to foster discussion among digital regulators and gather insights on each nation’s domestic digital regulatory coherence (DRCF, 2024). The INDRC is described in Table 2. The clearest output which the INDRC has put forward was on 8 November 2024 in collaborating on a co-hosted workshop with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) titled, ‘The Interplay Between Digital Regulatory Frameworks – Challenges and Opportunities of Structural Collaboration’ (OECD, 2024). This workshop included four sessions with opening and closing remarks. There is no public recording of the workshop, however, an agenda with listed panelists is available online. The listed panelists demonstrate a degree of multistakeholder participation with representation from government agencies, academia, law offices, and some private sector stakeholders.^{Footnote 3}

As this section has demonstrated, digital regulators forums are a growing governance innovation across countries domestically, while also networking with one another internationally. In their international context, they are working to coordinate actions with established international organizations such as the OECD. This paper now turns to analyzing strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of digital regulators forums.

Policy Learning for Governance Success

There are various strengths of digital regulators forums. Chief among these is learning from one another, both as digital regulators forums in the international context, as well as domestically as separate regulators in the same jurisdiction. Learning is a key component of developing regulations and policy frameworks (Heikkila & Gerlak, 2016). As Levinston (2020) notes, there are five types of learning which occur within governance of digital sector spaces. These include governance learning, network learning, policy learning, interorganizational learning, and organizational learning. Each of these forms of learning includes different parameters. For example, governance learning centres itself around how new ideas and forms of knowledge are utilized in a governance space by different actors. Interorganizational learning focuses on both formal and informal groups of organizations utilizing new information and processes for their networked activities. The process of having digital regulators forums falls within both of these governance and interorganizational learning processes, whereby networks of regulatory actors share information to push the fulfillment of digital policies. In doing so, they become routinized to the new information they share with one another, utilizing a broader systems approach to learning and capacity development, thereby thinking in broad contexts of digital spaces opposed to narrowed views of their business models within their purviews (e.g., a communications regulator focused on online news remuneration opposed to also broader data collection frameworks which allow online platforms to operate).

Policy learning for digital regulators forums can be thought of working similarly to the necessary information analysis and teamwork which underpins collaborative governance theories. Within collaborative governance, complex policy spaces are approached by multiple actors working together to solve problems faced by varied groups of stakeholders (Ansell & Gash, 2008). Multiple actors work to scope problems which no one actor could conceivably solve themselves (Gash, 2016). To this, each actor must learn from one another in the policy space to find solutions to problems which allows for the consensus of all stakeholders and the problems to become fully rectified. Within the digital regulators forums, these spaces include multiple government actors coming together to collaborate and learn from one another as a means of a comprehensive policy approach to regulating the digital sector. Through this collaboration, the digital regulators forums share information that can help their affiliated government departments and agencies coordinate digital policies.

To share information, these digital regulators forum participants would need to sign into Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreements at both a national level, and international level if the forums have membership of multiple countries. The purpose of MoU agreements is to specify areas where government agencies have a common interest in and share information and resources to extend their own capacities without increasing costs incurred by a single agency (e.g., in higher labour costs for increased personnel) (Suhardin & Flora, 2021). As a procedural step, digital regulators forums must create MoU’s between one another to operate. In the context of digital regulators forums, this has not been entirely seamless as explored in the next section.

Ensuring Regulators are Ready

When a regulator looks to attempt a new initiative, this can lead to hurdles. In the case of digital regulators forums, we primarily see a gap in planning. Planning is a key component of governance. As part of governance theories, planning theory emphasizes knowledge gaining, engaging, prescribing, and executing as pillars to formulating spaces for governance to be observed and environments to be steered (Beauregard, 2020). As Table 1 notes, digital regulators forums’ memberships have been open to new regulators entering into these spaces. In the UK case this included the Financial Conduct Authority less than a year following the inception of the DRCF. For Canada, the Copyright Board of Canada entered the CDRF over a year after the forum’s creation. Where it can be helpful for digital regulators forums to be malleable towards membership by various regulators, stronger planning to the business models of online platforms and determining which regulators ought to be part of a digital regulators forum would be beneficial. When a new member enters, this can reduce the timeliness of topics the digital regulators forum engages on as they are faced with onboarding a new member. Additionally, any MoU which has been signed in establishing a digital regulators forum would require amendment. For example, in the Canadian case, the CDRF’s one cited MoU is between the Competition Bureau, Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and CRTC as part of joint efforts in applying Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation. With the addition of the Copyright Board of Canada, this leaves a gap in an MoU which is appropriate for all parties to agree and participate in. Therefore, a weakness for digital regulators forums comes from not having a clear foundation in the form of information sharing and coordination which can be achieved through an MoU. In using our current Canadian example, the CDRF instead utilizes Terms of Reference (ToR) which can limit the ability for coordinated regulation and allow this digital regulators forum the ‘teeth’ to enacting broad-based regulations on online platforms which are operating in a manner incongruent with the public interest.

A second limitation of digital regulators forums which regulators must grapple with in determining their readiness includes the topics they choose to study. Across the listed digital regulators forums and the INDRC, AI as a topic for analysis is keenly mentioned. Focusing on this area reduces the capacity of digital regulators forums to utilize a coordinated regulatory strategy by not focusing on their current purviews. As Mueller (2025) argues, AI is a technology of various component parts, which each of these component parts will need existing regulations and regulators to perform their work in the public interest for enacting digital policies, opposed to treating AI as a distinct and new area of governance altogether. This creates an opportunity for digital regulators forums to focus on their original purviews in this AI example, opposed to in a unison way, with the exception of potentially mapping the companies which are developing AI from existing online platforms businesses (e.g., social media, website indexing). Digital regulators forums would therefore be better positioned to focus on the business models of online platforms they are responsible for regulating as currently mandated and focusing less on specific technologies. In other words, focus on companies as the root of emerging technologies.

A final consideration in assessing regulators’ readiness in digital regulators forums stems from levels of expertise in regulators. Given the complexities of the digital sector, it is key to have experts on hand. This can be achieved through strategically hiring for subject matter expertise, as well as by bridging experts into these workplaces through contract roles or potential multistakeholder working groups. By tapping into the broader expertise pool in a domestic environment, regulators will be able to forge relationships and gain more in-depth understandings by subject matter experts for more comprehensive and resilient regulations which they then work to enforce.

Global Partnerships

Digital regulators forums are entering into partnerships with one another as noted earlier in Table 2. There are additional opportunities that these forums could tap into for ensuring the successful implementation of this governance innovation. This includes expanding their workshops past the confides of the OECD into more spaces with multistakeholder participation. Three spaces which could benefit from such workshops which include the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

The ITU is the United Nations (UN) agency responsible for areas of telecommunications. It was developed in 1865 for the coordination of the rising global cable system and still works in global telecommunications development, technical standardization, and radiocommunications (Balbi & Fickers, 2020). The three areas of the ITU’s mandate become its three sectors and are abbreviated as, ITU-D (development), ITU-T (standardization), and ITU-R (radiocommunication). The ITU Council is the ITU governance authority where countries are recognized as ‘Member States’ and can vote on various items presented, and for candidates running for key leadership positions. At the ITU Council, working groups and expert groups develop the agenda for areas for Council to vote on. These Council Working Groups (CWG) and Council Expert Groups (IEG) might contain topics which extend notions of development, standardization, and radiocommunication. For example, in 2025 there is a CWG on Child Online Protection which can be seen as extending the idea of ‘development’ (ITU, n.d.). Similarly, the ITU also hosts the annual World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) High-Level Forums (HLF). The annual WSIS HLF is a space for those around the world to deliberate on ideas and initiatives as part of reviewing the WSIS Declaration, which was a 2005 global agreement on the future of ICT development, also referred to as the ‘Tunis Agenda’ (Singh, 2009; WSIS, 2005). Digital regulators forums, specifically the INDRC, could present at the annual WSIS HLF to help build conversations surrounding ICT regulatory development to other global stakeholders.

The UN ECOSOC meetings are a second space where a similar workshop INDRC gave to the OECD could be mirrored, but to a broader audience. ECOSOC is the UN’s body responsible for coordinating the UN’s economic, social, and environmental development work. It is one of the largest UN bodies and hosts multistakeholder forum on various topics (ECOSOC, n.d.; Zingales & Radu, 2017). Given the purview of ECOSOC to assess emerging issues in areas of the economic, social, and environmental, this could be a space of INDRC or individual digital regulators forums to be part of for building global engagement with their work.

Finally, digital regulators forums, in their INDRC collaboration, could present their work at multistakeholder dialogue spaces like the UN IGF. The IGF is a global dialogue space for Internet governance which allows for stakeholders around the world to come together in discussing emerging and pressing topics about the Internet (Caeiro et al., 2024). Panels are proposed for the IGF to review in developing the annual IGF Agenda. Digital regulators forums could present their work at the IGF and gain multistakeholder feedback on their initiatives, broadening their understanding of the digital sector and creating international networks with others who might not be part of, or yet have, a domestic digital regulators forum. In addition to the global IGF, there are also national/regional and youth IGF initiatives in countries. Domestic digital regulators forums could pitch a panel for their national, regional, or youth IGF to present on this governance innovation. In the Canadian example, the CDRF could present their work and/or enter discussions about their work with other stakeholder groups at either the Canadian IGF, Québec IGF, and/or the Canada Youth IGF. These IGF initiatives can allow domestic digital regulators forums to build broader multistakeholder networks in their evolving mandates for regulating the digital sector.

Each of these opportunities presented come with an administrative challenge: international capacity building. To achieve greater global coordination along key opportunities, international affairs teams or sectors will likely need to be expanded within regulators who participate in domestic digital regulators forums. Another option could be for one agency to expand their international affairs teams; however, this could reduce the capacity of digital regulators forums to share chairing duties of the space if only one regulator has the personnel available for international outreach and capacity building. A potential solution to this could be for an international affairs team who work in secondments along these various regulators, opposed to held by one regulator. Secondments are temporary positions for seasoned employees in government agencies to move between workplaces (O’Donoughue Jenkins & Anstey, 2017). They allow for a high degree of fluidity and expertise to be gained. To reduce a financial strain of expanding international affairs teams along all regulators in a digital regulators forum, secondments of a dedicated international affairs team to move between chairing regulators might alleviate this pressure, while still building a digital regulators forum’s international presence and engagement.

Conclusion

This essay has shown that digital regulators forums have the capacity for regulators to utilize a ‘whole of government’ approach to regulation. This coordinated regulatory capacity has not yet been utilized. The formation of digital regulators forums, however, is a first step in achieving such a unified regulatory approach. There are strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities with digital regulators forums. Where the digital regulators forums allow for enhanced capacity in learning the digital sector through sharing resources among participating regulators, there are issues of ensuring that these spaces have strong foundations for their formation and continued transparency to the public. Given that regulators have a responsibility to the public interest, ensuring that the public has access to information about digital regulators forums is a first step. Digital regulators forums will also do well with ensuring that they have experts in their teams and have mechanisms to allow multistakeholder participation from non-government employees to help consult on various topics. Given the high speed at which technology changes, allowing this openness and attention to expertise is critical. Finally, digital regulators forums have an opportunity in both domestic and international engagement. This will likely require expanded teams—especially in the international affairs side—to allow digital regulators forums to inspire other countries to take similar initiatives, and for these initiatives to join in broader international groups such as the INDRC. Overall, the governance innovation of digital regulators forums welcomes an opportunity for a multi-faceted and dynamic mechanism for regulating a concentrated digital sector.

Recommendations

• Recommendation 1: Increase transparency. As the analysis has shown, digital regulators forums differ around the world on transparency. This transparency is key to governance legitimacy, especially when pursuing a new governance innovation. Digital regulators forums should create their own dedicated websites which house all available information which might be accessible by the public. This will allow for broader discourse on their regulatory planning and potentially allow everyday citizens to submit interventions which are more critical and push regulators to pursue certain consultations for decisions in these topics.
• Recommendation 2: Bridge experts into the public service. Regulating the digital economy will require enhanced skillsets and innovative methodological approaches. Digital regulator forums will benefit from ensuring that their staff have subject matter expertise, as well as potential cross-sector experience for understanding how to approach the work of online platforms regulation. Agencies will need to be stringent in hiring along this and might need to waiver on skillsets which can be learned on the job through internal training (e.g., linguistic proficiency in multiple official languages).
• Recommendation 3: Develop multistakeholder partnerships. Changes in how the Internet is governed benefit from multistakeholder partnerships. By entering these types of collaborative partnerships, both domestically and internationally, digital regulators forums will be able to pull on expertise from varied stakeholder groups in guiding their processes for regulating the digital sector. Opportunities for international collaboration can be formed at the annual global IGF. Opportunities for domestic collaboration could be formed through informal working groups on specified subjects, as well as at annual national/regional and youth IGF initiatives.
• Recommendation 4: Expand international affairs sectors. Digital regulator forums will need to work in concert with their international counterparts. This helps to ensure that a multi-country process can take place which has been argued as key for regulating transnational corporations. Additionally, digital regulators forums benefit from international dialogue through common approaches and information sharing. To achieve this, international affairs teams will need to be expanded to ensure both research on the international reach of online platforms can occur quickly, as well as coordination with digital regulators forums’ international counterparts. An area digital regulators forum will need to determine is which agency in their mix ought to have this chairing role of a digital regulators forum with that chair conducting this international affairs sector expansion.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) for their support with this paper. An earlier working paper of this research was produced during a Digital Policy Hub Fellowship at CIGI, receiving funding from CIGI and a Mitacs Accelerate grant. Thank you to CIGI Digital Policy Hub coordination by Reanne Cayenne and Dianna English, as well as Vass Bednar and Elia Rasky who reviewed a first draft of this paper at CIGI. Finally, thank you to my doctoral supervisor, Catherine Middleton, for feedback on that earlier CIGI first draft of this paper.

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Date modified:

2025-06-04