PLATFORM POWER & PUBLIC VALUE

Abstract

This paper offers an analytical framework to critically examine the power relations that structure the online platform ecosystem. Following a relational understanding of power, it focuses on the connections between the five leading platform corporations - Alphabet-Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) - and the many other digital properties (i.e. platforms, websites, and apps) that populate the online ecosystem. Exploring these connections, we notice that a growing number of digital properties are integrated with, and increasingly dependent on the infrastructural services offered by the GAFAM platforms. These services include: advertising networks, login services, cloud hosting, app stores, payment systems, data analytics, video hosting, geospatial and navigation services, search functionalities, and operating systems. Such infrastructural services allow a wide variety of companies to make their products and services available online, attract and target users, analyze their activities, and generate revenue. It is through the ubiquitous integration and consistent use of these infrastructural services that platform power emerges and is consolidated. To demonstrate how such power relations can be analyzed, the paper highlights two key infrastructural services: app stores and ad networks. For each service it discusses two levels of analysis that can be pursued to gain insight in the workings of platform power. Ultimately a systematically analysis of the key infrastructural services will need to be developed to arrive at a refined taxonomy of platform power relations. Such taxonomy is essential to establish guidelines for governing the platform ecosystem in correspondence with key public values.

What is platform governance?

“…The key actors in platform governance therefore include not only users and platform companies, what Poell, Van Dijck, and Nieborg (2018) have called "complementors" (the host of data-brokers, advertisers, developers, and other parties that participate in a platform's ecosystem), but also, crucially, political actors including various branches of government, as well as other stakeholders and advocacy groups (non-governmental privacy and digital rights groups, academics and researchers, and investigative journalists, who all play a growing accountability function by scrutinizing the practices of platform companies). This is not to say that these political forces (such as state preferences) reign supreme; rather, I suggest that, following the insights of global governance scholarship, "a wide variety of forms of governance exist next to each other and that a hierarchy among these various mechanisms is hard, if not impossible, to discern" (Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006, 192).…”

Relevance of academic research in information technology and information management

“…The economic and social implications of the development of the large platform providers have been extensively analysed by economists and other social scientists, often in the context of governance, privacy and taxation issues (Poell et al , 2018; Evans and Schmalensee, 2016; Stone et al , 2017a), so here academics have made a significant and relevant contribution.…”