After decades of unregulated growth, the world's largest technology companies have now attracted the attention of regulators in both Europe and the US. Regulating “Big Tech”, however, has proven to be challenging, partly because of their size, but also because of their strategic importance in maintaining a competitive advantage between western nation-states and rising economies in Asia. The paradox is that regulators hope to create a regulatory regime that constrains the oligopoly power of Big Tech without quashing their capacity to innovate. Traditional regulatory theories are not equipped to address this paradox. Drawing from neo-institutional theory, we propose a “layered governance” model of regulation to address this problem. Layered governance is an emerging regulatory regime that distributes power across multiple government and non-government organizations while providing the regulated organizations with a degree of flexibility and choice by the organizations themselves as to the mode of regulation. We elaborate how layered governance is consistent with current understandings of regulation as derived from neo-institutional theory, elaborate how it differs from traditional approaches to regulation, and discuss how a layered governance approach to regulating Big Tech may evolve in the future.

中文翻译：

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监管大型科技公司的分层治理方法


经过数十年不受监管的增长，全球最大的科技公司现已引起欧洲和美国监管机构的关注。然而，事实证明，监管“大型科技公司”具有挑战性，部分原因在于它们的规模，还因为它们在维持西方民族国家和亚洲新兴经济体之间的竞争优势方面具有战略重要性。矛盾的是，监管机构希望建立一个监管制度，限制大型科技公司的寡头垄断力量，同时又不削弱它们的创新能力。传统的监管理论无法解决这一悖论。借鉴新制度理论，我们提出了“分层治理”的监管模式来解决这个问题。分层治理是一种新兴的监管制度，它将权力分配给多个政府和非政府组织，同时为受监管组织提供一定程度的灵活性以及组织自身对监管模式的选择。我们阐述了分层治理如何与当前对新制度理论衍生的监管理解相一致，阐述了它与传统监管方法的不同之处，并讨论了未来监管大型科技的分层治理方法可能如何演变。