Digital Platform Policy Highlights - Digest 45

Q4 Policy Changes: With regulators and the public watching closely, big platforms are making changes to keep users happy, loyal, and feeling good about being online.

Jun 18, 2025

This post is part eight of a series highlighting how platforms are responding to external regulations in Q4 2024 through policy updates and product adjustments aimed at enhancing compliance and user trust.

TL; DR→ Here are policy changes to address external regulation:

YouTube Tweaks Its Rules as Platforms Face Rising Scrutiny

YouTube's proactive teen content restrictions demonstrate strategic regulatory anticipation as the EU's Digital Services Act demands transparency on algorithmic amplification of systemic risks. By implementing safeguards against body comparison content and fitness idealization before facing direct enforcement, YouTube isn't just protecting minors—it's positioning itself as a responsible platform leader while competitors remain reactive to regulatory pressure. I like the possibility that regulatory compliance is about to become a competitive moat rather than just operational overhead. (link)

LinkedIn Halts AI Data Use for UK Users After Backlash

LinkedIn's suspension of UK user data for AI training following opt-out backlash illustrates how platforms are learning that default consent assumptions no longer align with regulatory frameworks. More interestingly, the geographic specificity of suspending only UK users suggests platforms are developing increasingly granular data governance capabilities to manage regulatory fragmentation. I see an opportunity for more platform experimentation driven by regulatory compliance teams of global digital platforms. (Link)

Perplexity AI Accused of Misusing News Corp Content

News Corp's allegations against Perplexity is one of the many cases of tension between AI platforms' content aggregation models and traditional media's revenue protection strategies. Perplexity denies many of News Corp’s allegations, stating that if information from these sources was needed, users would receive links to the original source. I can see an inevitable reckoning where AI platforms will aggressively need to develop revenue-sharing models with content creators, similar to how YouTube eventually created monetization partnerships with video creators. (link)

France and the proposed Digital Service Tax

In what may further accelerate a broader global trend in nations’ approach to platform taxation, France joins over a dozen countries in taxing platforms on gross revenue rather than declared profits, via its new Digital Services Tax. By imposing a 3% tax (or 5%) on digital advertising and intermediation revenues for companies exceeding €750 million globally, France isn't just generating revenue—it's directly challenging the tax optimization strategies that allow platforms like Google and Facebook to minimize their European tax obligations through profit-shifting mechanisms. I cannot help but recognize a parallel between this tax and some governments’ taxes on cigarettes and alcohol based on volume than profits, which acknowledged that certain “economic activities” warrant a different taxation approach. (link)

Meta, Data Retention Limits, and the EU Court Ruling

Apparently retaining consumer data indefinitely and using them for new purposes such as AI training violates two principles of GDPR: data minimization and purpose limitation, as per EU’s top court ruling. I feel that this requirement for data lifecycle management system is bound to challenge the foundation on which social media revenues are built on: accumulating behavioral data indefinitely to improve targeting precision and advertising revenue. If this ruling is permanent, the emergence of "data depreciation" as a new cost factor will be a reality in platform economics. Balancing advertising effectiveness and regulatory compliance is getting harder. (link)

Pinterest Faces Privacy Complaint in France due to User Tracking

The privacy advocacy group NOYB argued that Pinterest enabled personalized ad tracking without explicit consent and without an easy way to opt-out, violating GDPR's consent requirements. Similar to some of the cases above, GDPR has upended many platforms’ data collection economies and are forcing digital platforms to rethink their strategies if such regulations spread worldwide. Given that Pinterest maintains that they are GDPR compliant, privacy groups intend to expose the gap between platforms' stated privacy policies and their actual default configurations, some of which are inadvertently non-compliant (link)

Google's Compliance Experiment Creates New Non-Compliance Problem

You may know that the EU's Digital Services Act requires digital platforms to pay for news that is reused. So instead of paying, Google apparently tried to assess what happens if news is not displayed at all by not showing EU-based news to randomly chosen 1% of the population in 9 European countries—but in the process they became non-compliant with another prior agreement. The technical implementation backfired immediately when French officials declared the experiment violated Google's existing competition authority agreements, forcing the company to hastily exclude France from the test. Using live user experiments to understand regulatory boundaries is no longer as simple as it was in the 2000s.

Apple's Geoblocking Practices Violate EU Anti-Discrimination Rules

Apple's existing geoblocking practices on media services and app marketplace has attracted regulatory scrutiny. Apple apparently maintained location-based restrictions such as disabling certain customizations, app downloading, or music downloads based on the country of registering the apple account. As a technologist, I can understand how this blocking approach would help Apple maintain standard variants of iOS services without having to attempt region-specific customizations—but that violates EU’s anti-discrimination laws: discriminating against users based on their specific EU location. Whether Apple will invest in the technical infrastructure needed to provide region-specific customizations or are going to focus on costly reactive compliance is a billion dollar question (link)

Research help from Anantesh Mohapatra, Nicole Wu, Aarav Gupta, John Mai, and Simran Joshi (Thanks a ton, folks!)

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