Regulating digital platform power

摘要

The platform economy has been enjoying exponential growth leading to an extraordinary dominance of platform companies in the global economic system. Many businesses have come to rely upon information technology, data and internet connectivity for their operations. A few of them have grown into systematically important, even critical infrastructure for our economy and society. Digital platforms have thus developed as one of the foundations of the digital economy, providing the underlying infrastructure for a wide variety of different applications that are being built and distributed on it (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2017). The centrality of digital platforms is illustrated by its sheer size of market capitalization: the seven most valuable companies in the world operate as a digital platform, with Microsoft, Apple and Amazon leapfrogging to lead the bunch. These companies have been constructing ecosystem empires spanning multiple industries ranging from advertising, music and games to health, retail and food delivery. Their expansionist platform strategies have resulted in an almost unprecedented accumulation of economic power and control of numerous market categories and territories (Mansell and Steinmueller 2020; Barwise and Watkins 2018).