The missing link: how new institutions could improve what we read online

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.