When lawmakers sit down to write rules for digital platforms, they habitually reach for the regulatory playbook their predecessors wrote for broadcasting. It’s a reflex shaped by decades of handling indecency complaints, handing out spectrum licenses, and lecturing networks about the public interest. The sticking point is that the internet doesn’t act like a TV station. It doesn’t schedule anything, it has no fixed number of channels, and there is certainly no single control room where a responsible manager waits by the phone. Yet repeatedly, we see proposals that treat recommendation algorithms like programming directors, social feeds as if they were linear broadcasts, and users as a passive audience waiting for the next thing to be served to them. What we get is regulation that misfires—sometimes laughably, sometimes with real harm—because it’s aimed at a medium that no longer operates the way the rules assume.

The Broadcast Metaphor Haunting Tech Policy

To see why the broadcast model won’t let go, it helps to remember what it was originally built to fix. Radio and TV regulation grew out of scarcity. There were only so many frequencies, and the state had to dole them out. That allocation came with strings attached: serve the public interest, offer a range of viewpoints, keep the airwaves decent. The whole regulatory architecture assumed a tidy chain—producer, distributor, consumer—and a one-to-many shape. A station transmitted; the public received. Interactivity meant mailing a letter to the editor or phoning a switchboard during a pledge drive.

Now jump to a world where a teenager with a smartphone can reach more people in an hour than a local TV station reaches in a month. The scarcity that justified licensing is gone. The gatekeeping function that made content standards enforceable has evaporated. Yet the vocabulary of broadcast regulation—“platform responsibility,” “content moderation,” “due impartiality”—gets imported wholesale into digital policy debates. The words sound serious and weight-bearing, which is exactly why they’re so seductive. But they carry assumptions that snap on contact with networked media.

The Illusion of the Centralized Scheduler

Think about the recurring fantasy that a social media company “promotes” content the way a network schedules a prime-time slot. When a damaging video goes viral, the reflex is to ask: who put that there? On television, the answer is straightforward—a programming executive made a decision, or at least signed off on one. On a platform powered by collaborative filtering, the culprit isn’t a person but a pattern. Millions of individual actions—clicks, dwell times, shares—clump together into a ranking signal. No single employee decided to “boost” the video; the algorithm amplified it because the aggregate behavior of users told it to.

Regulators who treat algorithmic amplification as editorial curation are importing a mental model from an age of human gatekeepers. They then demand transparency or accountability mechanisms that assume a gatekeeper is standing right there. But ask an engineer why a particular post surfaced in your feed, and the honest answer is a probability distribution across thousands of features, none of which map cleanly onto the idea of “editorial judgment.” That isn’t an evasion; it’s a description of a fundamentally different architecture. Insisting on broadcast-style accountability for algorithmic outcomes is like demanding to know which editor at the weather bureau decided it would rain today.

When the Law Imagines an Audience, Not a Public

Broadcast regulation also carries a particular theory about the person on the receiving end. The archetypal subject is a viewer—passive, impressionable, in need of protection from harmful signals. That paternalistic stance made sense when the medium was genuinely one-way. Kids couldn’t talk back to the television; adults couldn’t fact-check a news anchor in real time. The law positioned the state as a guardian, standing between a vulnerable public and the powerful transmitter.

Online, that dynamic flips. The “audience” is simultaneously a producer, a distributor, and a fact-checker. A misleading post can get corrected in the replies within minutes. Content that one community finds offensive is celebrated by another. The simple act of scrolling, liking, and sharing shapes what others see. Regulation that treats users as passive consumers ignores the participatory texture of networked spaces and, worse, can inadvertently smother the very counter-speech that makes the medium self-correcting. When a law requires platforms to remove content swiftly and aggressively, it often strips away the context that would let users evaluate it critically. The paternalistic model, applied to an interactive medium, ends up infantilizing people who are perfectly capable of discernment—and silencing those who would challenge misinformation directly.

The Scale Problem That Broadcast Never Had

Television regulation could work at a human scale because the number of broadcasters was small. A regulator could reasonably expect to review every licensed station’s performance. Even cable, with its hundreds of channels, stayed within a manageable universe. The internet, by contrast, hosts billions of pieces of content daily across millions of services. Any regulatory framework that demands case-by-case adjudication of content decisions will either be hopelessly under-enforced or will lean on automated filtering so crude that it recreates the very problem it was supposed to solve.

This isn’t an argument for paralysis. It’s an observation that the procedural machinery of broadcasting law—complaint intake, investigation, adjudication, remedy—was built for a world where the number of disputes could be counted in the hundreds per year. Drop that machinery into a context where disputes are effectively infinite, and you get either a Potemkin regulator handing out symbolic fines or a system of mass pre-publication censorship by error-prone software. Neither outcome serves the public interest that broadcasting law claims to protect.

Rethinking Harms Without the Broadcast Lens

If the broadcast metaphor is this flawed, what should take its place? The answer isn’t a single tidy framework—that would just repeat the mistake in a new costume. Instead, we need to pull apart the harms we worry about and address each one with tools that fit its character.

Take the problem of illegal content, such as child sexual abuse material or non-consensual intimate imagery. These aren’t “broadcast” problems; they’re criminal law problems that happen to travel through digital networks. The appropriate response involves law enforcement, targeted detection tools built with civil liberties safeguards, and international cooperation—not a content-licensing regime modeled on the FCC. When we frame these issues as “platform failures,” we let the actual perpetrators off the hook and assign liability to the intermediary that, in many cases, is the only entity cooperating with investigators.

Then there is the cluster of concerns around algorithmic amplification: the feeling that platforms are polarizing societies, addicting teenagers, and spreading outrage because it pays. Here the broadcast metaphor is especially tempting because it feels like a programming choice. But the mechanisms are different. Amplification is a function of engagement optimization, which is itself a function of the business model. If we want to change what algorithms prioritize, we should regulate the economic incentives that shape them—data practices, advertising targeting, default settings—rather than micromanaging editorial outcomes. A law that says “don’t amplify harmful content” is unenforceable without defining “harmful” and “amplify” in ways that quickly become a content police state. A law that says “you may not optimize for engagement in ways that demonstrably harm minors” is narrower, more testable, and doesn’t require the state to become a national editor.

Transparency That Actually Informs

One spot where the broadcast legacy offers a useful starting point—if you strip away its centralizing assumptions—is transparency. Broadcasting required licensees to keep public files, disclose ownership, and log political advertising. The principle was sound: the public deserves to know how its information environment is put together. But the implementation was designed for a small number of easily identifiable entities. For digital platforms, effective transparency means something different: access to data for independent researchers, plain explanations of how ranking signals work, and audit rights that let outsiders verify platform claims. It doesn’t mean publishing every piece of content moderation policy in a dense terms-of-service document and calling it a day. Real transparency is about giving the public the ability to understand the system, not just piling paperwork on companies.

Toward a More Honest Conversation

The stubborn persistence of the broadcast model in tech policy isn’t just a conceptual slip; it has practical costs. It steers legislative energy toward content takedowns when the deeper issues are structural. It encourages a performative politics of hauling CEOs into hearings and demanding they explain why a specific post stayed up, as if a single decision proves systemic malice. It produces laws that are either so vague they invite arbitrary enforcement or so specific they’re obsolete before they take effect. And it distracts from the harder work of designing governance for a medium that is decentralized, global, and shaped by millions of independent actors.

We don’t need to toss out every insight from a century of media regulation. The values that animated broadcasting law—pluralism, accountability, protection of the vulnerable—remain vital. But they have to be put into practice through frameworks that respect the architecture of the systems they aim to govern. That means less time imagining that platforms are television networks with better graphics, and more time sitting with the uncomfortable reality that the public square is no longer a square. It’s a sprawling, messy, self-organizing ecosystem that defies simple metaphors. Our laws should reflect that complexity, not pretend it away.