While the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) represent a major shift in internet regulation, they suffer from a critical structural gap. These frameworks focus primarily on ‘defensive empowerment’— enabling users to block or report unwanted content — while neglecting constructive empowerment — the ability of users to decide what information they wish to see. The paper argues that without collective institutions to signal content quality, users cannot assess quality beforehand, creating a market failure that pushes out expensive, high-quality content in favour of cheap, sensationalist, algorithm-driven content. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes the creation of Trusted Content Creators (TCCs): voluntary, self-governing groups of like-minded content creators that certify content quality through cross-platform labels. By mandating that platforms allow users to filter their feeds through these external quality signals, the law can decentre the role of algorithmic curation and create new markets.
Martin Husovec (Fri,) studied this question.