The transfer of internet governance from the state to the market is proper to platform regulation on the dark web, or the amorphous collection of anonymous internet sites accessible through overlay networks.

In "Exchange relations on the dark web" (Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2017), I demonstrate how a libertarian narrative informed the regulatory structure of Silk Road, the inaugural dark web market. To govern anonymous commerce on the platform, Silk Road’s architect created a series of automated protocols, which were designed to replace state regulations and to demonstrate that free markets could ensure economic cooperation without institutional authority structures. In place of contracts and courts, for instance, payment escrows and cryptocurrencies were to serve as safeguards against fraud during commercial transactions. Through an analysis of court records, FBI evidence, and user statements collected through web crawls, I reveal that these automated protocols underwrote the very practices they were meant to obviate: fraud, blackmail, coercion, and monopoly, which proliferated on the site and marked the failure of the platform as an experiment in extragovernmental self-regulation.

Still, the libertarian dream of Silk Road persists. As I show in "Digital black markets" (What is the Universe? 2020), to supplant institutional regulations with platform mechanisms remains a central ambition of criminal e-commerce. Drawing on government reports and long-term web crawls, I show how digital black markets continuously endeavor to build their own regulatory systems while leveraging breakdowns in broader regulatory apparatuses. eBay’s black market in restricted military equipment, for example, relies on a coded language to regulate entry while exploiting flaws in the military’s system of equipment regulation.

These studies speak to emerging trends in platform governance and reveal important lessons about the limits of self-regulation. Faced with the possibility of industry oversight, major social media platforms have begun to create their own regulatory institutions, internalizing state structures in order to avoid becoming their subjects. Facebook, for instance, has developed an Oversight Board or “Supreme Court” as an internal judiciary for content moderation decisions. My work on the dark web underlines the limits of these platform institutions, which fail to fulfill state functions and compound the very problems they purport to solve.

Header image. Dark web map by Hyperion Gray. The software firm crawled, indexed, and captured the front pages of thousands of dark web sites. Image courtesy of Hyperion Gray. See the full map at hyperiongray.com.