The Legal Position and Effects of Self-regulation of Digital Platforms

Digital platforms, as a complex type of businesses in the digital economy, provide their services all over the world. Sometimes they try to provide services to users from other parts of the world and have the position of being an intermediary in the interactions and communications. Therefore, with various goals, including controlling the activities of users interacting with each other or with the platform, they regulate users' activities in the platform and call it self-regulation. The place of this self-regulation in the legal system and the effects it has on people in different situations are essential for policymakers and regulators, which cannot be examined except through the precise understanding of the legal nature of this self-regulation and determining the rights and duties of stakeholders related to a platform. In this work, by using the descriptive-analytical method while knowing the digital platforms, various methods of self-regulation by their owners have been investigated to be able to answer that, what is the nature of this self-regulation in our legal system. All kinds of self-regulation methods can be considered as an agreement between users with each other or with platform owners, which, of course, has a different place in the legal system in different situations depending on the type of practices and technical infrastructure.