Abstract
This article addresses the problem of platform power by probing current regulatory frameworks’ basic assumptions about how tech firms operate in digital ecosystems. Platform power is generally assessed in terms of economic markets in which individual corporate actors harness technological innovations to compete fairly, thereby maximising consumer welfare. We propose three paradigmatic shifts in the conceptualisation of platform power. First, we suggest to expand the notion of consumer welfare to citizen wellbeing, hence addressing a broader scope of platform services’ beneficiaries. Second, we recommend considering platform companies as part of an integrated platform ecosystem, acknowledging its interrelational, dynamic structure. And third, we shift attention from markets as level playing fields towards societal platform infrastructures where hierarchies and dependencies are built into their architecture. Reframing platform power may be a necessary condition for updating and integrating current regulatory regimes and policy proposals. Citation & publishing information
Highlights
In March 2019, the European Commission fined Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. 1.5 billion euro for antitrust violations in the online advertising market—the third fine in three years. In July 2018, European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager had levied a record fine of 4.3 billion euro on Google for breaching European competition rules by forcing cell phone manufacturers to pre-install a dozen of the firms’ apps when using Android—Google’s mobile operating system
In a radically transforming digital world fuelled by data and steered by platforms, European regulators and policymakers are rethinking their strategies towards digital markets in which platform power mostly rests with US firms (Crémer, de Montjoye, & Schweitzer, 2019)
We propose to broaden the scope from single corporations operating multisided platforms (MSPs) to an integrated platform ecosystem that allows us to inspect how platforms are behaving in relation to each other, across markets, and across societal sectors (Van Dijck, 2013)
Summary
In March 2019, the European Commission fined Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. 1.5 billion euro for antitrust violations in the online advertising market—the third fine in three years. In July 2018, European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager had levied a record fine of 4.3 billion euro on Google for breaching European competition rules by forcing cell phone manufacturers to pre-install a dozen of the firms’ apps when using Android—Google’s mobile operating system. A number of American and European legal scholars have argued the need for a broader set of concepts to help investigate how power gets accumulated or abused in online networked environments (Cohen, 2017; Daskalova, 2015; Kahn, 2018; Rahman, 2018). In line with these calls for antitrust-reform, we question the suitability of prevailing legal-economic concepts to capture undue accumulation of platform power.
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