PLATFORM PLANET

DEVELOPMENT IN THE
INTELLIGENCE ECONOMY

Anita Gurumurthy, Deepti Bharthur, Nandini Chami

with Jai Vipra & Ira Anjali Anwar

IT for Change | 2019

This report was produced as part of the research project ‘Policy
frameworks for digital platforms - Moving from openness to inclusion’.
The project seeks to explore and articulate institutional-legal
arrangements that are adequate to a future economy that best serves
the ideas of development justice. This initiative is led by IT for Change,
India, and supported by the International Development Research Centre
(IDRC), Canada.

Authors

Anita Gurumurthy, Deepti Bharthur, Nandini Chami

with Jai Vipra & Ira Anjali Anwar

Research coordination team

Principal Investigator: Anita Gurumurthy

Co-investigators: Deepti Bharthur, Nandini Chami
Research Assistance: Sarada Mahesh, Prakriti Bakshi
Design: Meenakshi Yadav, Prakriti Bakshi

© IT for Change 2019

Licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
 Platform Planet:
Development in the Intelligence Economy

Anita Gurumurthy, Deepti Bharthur, Nandini Chami

with Jai Vipra & Ira Anjali Anwar

IT for Change | 2019

Page left intentionally blank
Table of Contents

1. Overview of the research 8

1.1 Rationale & Context 8
1.2 Methodology 9

2. Unravelling platformization – discussion of findings 32
2.1 Varied trajectories of platformization 32
2.2 The intelligence premium 38
2.3 Algorithmic optimization 48
2.4 Data as an economic resource 60

3. Conclusions – from ecosystems of value to ecologies of choice 66

3.1 Strategic choices framework for platform models 67
3.2 An alternative imaginary for the platform economy 71

4. Platform governance: the way forward 75

4.1 Governance challenges in the platform economy 75
4.2. Curbing digital monopolies 78
4.3 Creating an enabling environment for inclusive innovation 86
4.4 Redrafting worker rights in the gig economy 88
4.5 Building a data constitutionalism for the platform economy 91

References 96
List of Tables
Table 1. Sectoral Case Studies
Table 2. Legal Reviews
Table 3. Think Pieces
Table 4. Research Framework
Table 5. The Sticky Layers of MercadoLibre
Table 6. How Algorithms Game Actors
Table 7. Characteristics of Ownership, Algorithmic Control and Value
Distribution in Platform Ecosystems
Table 8. Upgrading Sectoral Legislation for the Platform Economy, a Snapshot
Table 9. An Indicative Categorization of Ownership Rights in Data

List of Figures
Figure 1. Platformization and the New Epoch of Economic Organization
Figure 2. The Algorithmic ‘Brain’
Figure 3. A Strategic Choices Framework for Platform Models
Figure 4. Illustrative Typologies Based on A Strategic Choices Framework for Platforms
Figure 5. Governing the Platform Economy : Digital Monopolies
Figure 6. Governing the Platform Economy : Techno-design
Figure 7. Governing the Platform Economy : Labor law
Figure 8. Governing the Platform Economy : Data Governance

List of Boxes
Box 1. Platform Myths Explained
Box 2. Epistemic Infrastructures in Fintech, an Illustration
Box 3. Value Maximization at the Edges
Box 4. Russian and EU regulators’ Responses to Bayer’s Acquisition of Monsanto
Box 5. Essential Platform Infrastructure: The Indian approach

6 PLATFORM PLANET
CHAPTER 1
2019 7
 Overview of the Research

1.1 Rationale & Context

The platform model has emerged as a game changing force,
transforming economic activity across key sectors (Srnicek, 2017;
UNCTAD, 2018). Platforms orchestrate the production and exchange
of products and services by optimizing relationships among a network
of actors – consumers, advertisers, service providers, producers,
suppliers and even objects (Kenny & Zysman, 2016; Srnicek, 2017).
Platformization as the process of such a shift towards new modes of
production and exchange serves as the pièce de résistance of global
economic organization in the digital paradigm.

Whether in mainstream popular discourse or research, this turn in

economic organization is emerging as a favored subject. Buoyant
discourses celebrating ‘innovation’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘disruption’
today jostle with concerned echoes around the ‘Amazonification’ of
the commercial world and the rise and rise of tech monopolies (C
WorldWide Asset Management, 2018). Concerns about the global
currents of platformization extend to the adverse terms of market
engagement for smaller or less powerful players – workers, small
producers and enterprises, developing nations – and the real-world
outcomes for local development. Regulatory deficits present another
challenge, as institutions struggle to respond to the public policy
Platformization making imperative in relation to the platform economy (IT for Change,
2017a)1.
needs to be
interrogated from IT for Change’s research project, Policy Frameworks for Digital
Platforms — Moving from Openness to Inclusion (2017 to 2019), is a
the standpoint scholarly attempt to understand the platformization phenomenon with
an explicit focus on exploring and articulating the institutional-legal
of development arrangements that are adequate to a future economy serving the ideas
justice of development justice.

1 In our background paper, we outlined the case for focused research enquiry on the
platformization of the global economy. We touched upon some broad social and economic
fallouts of the phenomenon – market capture, the access-for-data regime, the discursive in-
fluence of platform monopolies and crystallization of exploitative economic arrangements.
We argued the need for forward looking policy frameworks as platforms become ubiquitous,
to ensure that economies of the future are inclusive and equitable.

8 PLATFORM PLANET
This multi-country, cross-sectoral research project brings together This multi-country,
learnings from a range of socio-economic contexts across the world, on
the platformization phenomenon. cross-sectoral
The following research questions were sought to be addressed through
research project
the project: brings together
I. What are the social-relational architectures of the platform learnings from
economy? Specifically,
• What are the discourses, norms and rules defining rights and a range of
obligations of actors in the platform ecosystem? socio-economic
• How is power structured among actors in the platform ecosystem?
What do empirical explorations of the platform ecosystem tell us contexts on the
about social, economic and gender justice?
platformization
II. What legal-institutional approaches can be used to future-proof the
phenomenon
platform economy from inequality, injustice and exclusion? Specifically,
• What alternative conceptions of platformization are necessary to
promote social, economic and gender justice in future economy
and society?
• What synergies are necessary across technology, economic, and
social policies to build a platform governance framework that
promotes equality and inclusion?

This report is divided into four major sections. Chapter 1 provides an

overview of the research and offers brief snapshots from the sectoral
case studies, legal reviews and think pieces undertaken as part of the
project. In Chapter 2, we present the major findings from the synthesis.
The concluding arguments of the research, with a Strategic Choices
Framework for Platform Models, is included in Chapter 3. In Chapter
4, we end with policy recommendations and directions for platform
governance.

1.2 Methodology
1.2.1 Scope

As part of this project, 12 research studies using a case study method

were undertaken in various sites in the Global North and South – in

2019 9
Platforms Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America².1These studies
provide for a comparative analysis of the platformization phenomenon
orchestrate in a variety of contexts extending from advanced economies in the
Global North, to developing and less developed economies in the
the production Global South. The research included:
and exchange
a. Sectoral Case Studies: These studies (See Table 1) touch upon a
of products broad range of sectors – e-commerce, ride-hailing, food delivery,
agriculture and grocery e-tail, tourism, care work, video-on-demand,
and services fintech and goods sharing– where digital platforms are rapidly on the
by optimizing rise.

relationships b. Legal Reviews: These studies (See Table 2) are in-depth assessments
of the evolving policy context with respect to, 1. the traditional
among a network domains of commerce regulation such as competition, consumer rights
and labor rights as they become implicated in the activities of digital
of actors –
governance, and 2. data governance and the many contestations
consumers, around it, both from the point of view of citizen rights and privacy
as well as of data’s economic value. Through primary and secondary
advertisers, research, collaborating teams developed a comprehensive state of
play on the regulatory environment in their respective domains and
service providers, geographies, and a research report with insights from one or more
producers case-studies.

c. Think Pieces: A series of five thinkpieces were also commissioned

under the project that investigate stand-alone themes and issues in the
platform economy. These essays (See Table 3) also inform the analysis
presented in this report.

2 Following the development of a background paper that comprehensively laid down the
problem statement and objectives of the project, an open call was issued in August 2017
for researchers. 62 applications from 32 countries were received in total and collaborating
research teams were finalized after a two step evaluation process.

10 PLATFORM PLANET
 Table 1. Sectoral Case Studies

Asia

Country Domain Focus Method

China Ride-hailing, Worker perspectives on platform work and the Survey,
Food delivery Chinese state’s policy response in the context of Ethnography,
its techno-nationalistic vision Participant
Observation,
Interviews

India Agriculture & Impact of platformization on the livelihoods of Interviews,

Grocery e-tail small producers and traders at various stages of Participant
the agricultural supply chain Observation,
FGDs, Policy
Analysis

Indonesia Tourism The economic, spatial, territorial and cultural Interviews,

implications of travel platforms in the travel and Participant
tourism sector in Indonesia for social inclusion Observation,
FGDs

Philippines Care work Impact of emerging digital platforms in care Policy Analysis,
work in the Philippines on narratives of Interviews
domestic work, gender and labor

North America

Country Domain Focus Method

Canada Goods-sharing Data regimes in the platform economy in Interviews,
Canada and how they shape possibilities for App
collaboration and community building Walkthrough3,1
Policy Analysis

3 Deploys a walkthrough technique to systematically and forensically step through the various stages of app registration and entry,
everyday use and discontinuation of use (Light et al., 2019, as cited in Reilly & Nieves, 2019)

2019 11
 Table 1. Sectoral Case Studies (cont.)

Latin America

Country Domain Focus Method

Argentina, E-commerce The Rioplatense platform economy of Interviews,
Uruguay Mercadolibre, a regional e-commerce ‘unicorn’ Actor-Network
company Mapping,
Discursive
Analysis

Brazil Video-on- Impact of Video on Demand (VoD) platforms Policy Analysis,

Demand on Brazilian cultural diversity and independent Interviews
media

Uruguay Fintech Peer-to-Peer (P2P) based lending platforms Interviews,

in Uruguay and the fintech regulatory Policy Analysis
environment in the country

Africa

Country Domain Focus Method

Nigeria Mobile money, The institutional-regulatory context of Content analysis,
E-commerce, platformization and digital economy in Nigeria Interviews
Navigation and implications for the growth of domestic
platforms

South Africa Ride-hailing The operational and labor dynamics of ride- Content analysis,
hailing platforms Uber and Taxify in South Africa Interviews
in the context of ‘taxi wars’ in the country

12 PLATFORM PLANET
 Table 2. Legal Reviews

European Union

Country Domain Focus Method

Belgium, Consumer Gaps in European consumer protection and Interviews,
France, Italy Protection, labor laws with respect to ride-hailing, gig work Survey Policy
(EU) Labor Rights, and accommodation platforms in Belgium, Analysis,
Data France and Italy Stakeholder
Governance Consultation
UK Data UK’s policy environment for data collection, Interviews,
governance analysis, and sharing in the context of laws such Policy Analysis,
as the General Data Protection Regulation Stakeholder
(GDPR), Investigatory Powers Act and the Consultation
Digital Economy Act

Table 3. Think Pieces

Title Focus

Show me the Money! Worker Assessment of worker well-being in the platform economy based
Well-Being on Labor Platforms on perspectives of blue-collar workers in ride-hailing and home-
in India service platforms in India

Tipping the Scale: Notes on the Reflections about technical, policy, legal, design, and regulatory
Topologies of Big Data Platforms mechanisms that seek to hold algorithmic systems in platforms to
account

See, Nudge, Control and Profit: Analysis of how digital platforms are reshaping knowledge
Digital Platforms as Privatized production systems and the development outcomes of the same
Epistemic Infrastructures

The Rise of Ant Financial: Evaluation of the recent rise of Ant Financial in China and the
The Double Articulation power dynamics that characterize Chinese-style platform
of ‘Platformization’ and capitalism
‘Infrastructuralization’ in China

Regulating Digital Media Roadmap for regulatory sandbox approaches to digital content
Platforms: Challenges and platforms as an alternative to heavy-handed regulation practices in
Initiatives in Thailand Thailand

2019 13
 1.2.2 Method

Using the case study method, collaborating teams covered specific

sectors and platforms, and domains of policy, situating their analysis
within specific geographic sites of analysis. A research framework for
the project was developed by the lead research team at IT for Change
through a synthesis of the initial proposals and a literature review of
the domain (See Table 4).

Depending on the specific contours of the study in question, elements

of the research framework developed by the lead research team were
included by collaborating teams into their research and analysis. A
range of secondary methods were used by collaborating teams for data
collection and analysis (See Tables 1,2) including interviews, surveys,
ethnography, participant observation and policy analysis4.1

Research reports and policy overviews authored by collaborating

teams for their respective sites, and think-pieces were subsequently
analyzed by the lead research team through a multi-step process as
below.

• An initial template with broad pegs for analysis was developed,

building on 1. the research framework (Gurumurthy & Bharthur,
2017), and 2. a first level review of research reports and policy
overviews.

• This template was used as a guide to undertake close-reading

of the research reports and to identify and excerpt key analytical
threads from every study and think-piece in the project.

• Through a collaborative review and workshopping, emerging

themes were debated and further refined.

4 Methods were deployed and used for analysis through different scholarly traditions by
collaborating teams.

14 PLATFORM PLANET
 Table 4. Research Framework

Level 1: Mapping the platform • Actors that make up the platform ecosystem
ecosystem • Structures that constitute the norms, rules and
practices of the platform ecosystem
• Value created and distributed within the platform
• ecosystem

Level 2: Analyzing development • Inclusion

outcomes • Choices
• Capabilities
• Location
• Identity

Level 3: Constructing inclusive • Sectoral governance

policy frameworks • Social justice
• Economic equity

2019 15
NIGERIA Towards Inclusive Platformization in Nigeria
Kemi Ogunyemi, Martha Onyeajuwa, Ogechi Adeola, Uchechukwu Aneke,
Chika Nwogu, Onyinyechi Akagha, Azeezat Ajibola

What?
Study of three home grown Nigerian platforms, Konga, an e-commerce platform, Gomyway,
a ride hailing platform, and Diamond Y’ello, a mobile money platform, to assess the interplay
between systems of governance, digital environment and operations of platform companies.

How?
Stakeholder interviews with platform owners, users and focus group discussions with con-
sumers and users.

Insights
Despite the growth in e-commerce in Nigeria, platforms operating in the space are
yet to incur profits. Current players do not have the capacity to process more than
5000 orders per day, which limits their chances to scale up.

Challenges of poor broadband penetration, and high access costs, lack of energy
infrastructure, and inadequate logistics are significant challenges to platform
growth in Nigeria.

Poor cyber-security and high incidences of bank fraud have meant that platform
users still mistrust online payment systems, thus hampering the adoption of digital
platforms.

16 PLATFORM PLANET
SOUTH AFRICA Investigating the Operational and Labor Policy
Frameworks for Taxi-Hailing Platforms: Case of Uber
and Taxify In South Africa
Admire Mare, Sarah Chimu, Shepherd Mopfu

What?
Study of two ride-hailing platforms in South Africa, Uber and Taxify, in the context of ‘taxi
wars’ in the country.

How?
Review of policy documents and media coverage; interviews with drivers working with
ride-hailing platforms and operating metered taxis.

Insights
High unemployment, accompanied by an influx of migrant labor from neighboring
countries, has led to the rapid adoption of ride-hailing platforms in South Africa as a
means of employment. In a highly unequal society, this has deepened existing fissures
between ‘insiders’ (locals) and outsiders (African migrants who are depicted as ‘job-
stealers’), and between drivers working through platforms and metered taxi drivers.

In-transit heists have been a major safety issue for drivers on ride-hailing platforms.
Cash-based rides are the most risky for drivers, who are not only under threat from
roadside stick-ups, but also violence from competing, metered taxi drivers.

Despite its higher commission rates, Uber is the prefered platform for drivers, as the
platform regulates the number of working hours (with a daily limit of 12 hours) and
the number of drivers. Moreover, Uber’s clientele is largely white and middle class
and uses credit cards for payments. This further contributes to Uber’s popularity
among drivers in a context where holding cash is a safety risk for drivers.

2019 17
CHINA Deliver on the Promise of Platform Economy
Julie Yujie, Chen Sophie Ping Sun and Jack Linchuan Qiu

What?
Study of worker perceptions in ride-hailing and food-delivery sectors in China’s platform
economy.

How?
Surveys and virtual ethnography, participant observation, and interviews with workers and
other stakeholders.

Insights
The governance of digital platforms is ambiguous and inconsistent in China.
For instance, the tight regulation of media content platforms (facilitating a virtual
public sphere without potential for political action), diverges from the governance
of platforms that mediate economic transaction (such as Didi), for which policies
are largely undefined or ambiguous and thus favor platform growth.

China’s burgeoning platform economy is deeply entrenched in the country’s

preexisting informal labor market, where labor is regulated under the system of
“decentralized legal authoritarianism”. This practice facilitates the governance of
labor at the local level and contains collective action by workers. Varying localized
regulations coupled with the reinforcement of informality via platformization are
accentuating precarity for workers.

Algorithmic management of platform workers combines with existing labor practic-

es to further diminish workers’ bargaining power and segment them. This happens
through various ways including real time-tracking, discriminatory job-allocations,
and creation of hierarchies through reward and punishment.

18 PLATFORM PLANET
INDIA Farm to Fork: Understanding the Role of Digital
Platforms in Agriculture, E-tail and FaaS
Anita Gurumurthy & Deepti Bharthur

What?
Study of platformization of the Indian agricultural sector and its impact on the livelihoods of
small producers and traders through three case studies – Ekgaon, a social enterprise model;
Ninjacart, a for-profit market linkage platform; and e-NAM, the national agro-commodity
trading platform

How?
Participant observations, interviews and FGDs with farmers and farmer producer
organizations, traders, market board representatives, and platform company CEOs.

Insights
Current platform models in agriculture that have focussed mostly on business-
to-business layers have a long way to go in tackling the long-standing problems
of Indian agriculture. However, ethical data brokerage and contextualized
intermediation practices, as seen in the case of Ekgaon and Ninjacart respectively,
have been beneficial to farmers, who have seen gains through their association with
these platforms.

Experiences with e-NAM, the public sector trading portal for agricultural
commodities, have proven to be a mixed bag for farmers. Critical infrastructural
gaps and the reticence of traders to engage with the online system render the
platform a promising, but partial, solution. By integrating ancilliary activities that
traditionally traders and commission agents have undertaken for farmers – such as
warehousing, logistics and credit, e-NAM will likely have more benefits for farmers.

Lack of public data architecture and data governance models has a direct bearing
on fledgling platforms and the prospects for platform innovation in Indian
agriculture. Private data capture is either highly corporatized in the hands of TNCs
or is siloed and fragmented amongst smaller players, thus reducing the overall
competitiveness of the sector. Data held within government systems and agencies
on agriculture, if opened up and made usable, can go a long way in mitigating this
paucity.

2019 19
INDONESIA Making Travel Platforms Work for Women, Small
Business Holders, and Marginalized Workers in
Indonesia’s Tourism Economy
Caitlin Bentley & Ilya Maharika

What?
Study of online travel platforms for review, accommodation and transportation, in the con-
text of Indonesia’s tourism industry with a focus on exclusion/inclusion.

How?
Qualitative and participatory methods, including GIS mapping, ethnographic observations,
interviews and focus group discussions with workers, SMEs and larger businesses in Bali,
Lombok and Yogyakarta.

Insights
A GIS mapping of Yogyakarta revealed that over 70 percent of accommodation es-
tablishments are listed on TripAdvisor, with the total reach of all platforms, includ-
ing Google, at 98.6 percent. This demonstrates an almost complete dependence on
some form of digital platform in the tourism sector in Indonesia.

Workers in the tourism industry face a double whammy; they do not have a share
in the platform-related gains of tourist establishments, and also bear the brunt of
platform-induced volatility. If an establishment loses business due to bad reviews,
worker earnings are affected.

In most cases, even if women officially run the tourist business, they prefer to let
their husbands or sons manage all digital engagements, as they don’t consider
themselves adept at using technologies. Furthermore, for the majority of women
interviewed, business ownership and platform use did not change their power or
position within their family and community.

20 PLATFORM PLANET
PHILIPPINES Cleaning Ladies on Demand: Are Local Digital
Platforms Transforming Domestic Work in the
Philippines?
Teresita Barrameda, Arlen Sandino Barrameda, Liza Garcia and Jessamine Pacis

What?
Study of three on-demand service platforms in the Philippines - Urbia, Clean Zone and
Lingap Gailing Cleaning Consultants (LGCC), with a view to understand the changing nature
of care work in the platform economy.

How?
Policy mapping and semi structured interviews with different key informants – workers,
platform owners, government agencies and unions. Platform owners, government agencies
and unions.

Insights
Domestic work platforms in the Philippines use a human concierge, instead of an
automated system or algorithm. This means that clients using online platforms to
engage care workers can browse and select their service provider, but this option is
not available to workers. Given high costs of internet in the country, this ‘amphibian’
platform model enjoys greater viability.

Though platforms have the potential to facilitate regular employment for workers,
the current laws on domestic work do not mandate this. Only one of the platforms
studied, Clean Zone, has hired domestic workers as salaried employees. The others
do not offer women workers any formal protection, treating them instead as
‘independent contractors'.

Platform-based work is not seen as a long term option by women workers. It is

perceived as a source of supplementary income for the household or as transition
work. Women's participation in these platforms does not seem to contribute to
status gains in the household.

2019 21
A R G E N T I N A & U R U G U AY Mapping the Rioplatense Platform Economy: The
case of MercadoLibre in Uruguay and Argentina
Alejandro Artopoulos & Ana Laura Rivoir

What?
Analysis of the MercadoLibre e-commerce platform – actors, regulatory structures and
norms, and how value is created and distributed in the ecosystem.

How?
Stakeholder interviews with MercadoLibre’s management and participating MSMEs,
discourse analysis of the regulatory debate, mapping of the platform’s actor-network.

Insights
MercadoLibre is viewed as plugging critical infrastructural gaps around logistics
and payment systems in Argentina. Its data driven practices have allowed the plat-
form to venture into other services, for instance, the fintech market, with payment
tools like ‘Mercado Pago’ and lending services for sellers such as ‘Mercado Crédi-
tos’. While these services allow unbanked customers to access loans, they have also
accentuated the dependency of small enterprises on the MercadoLibre ecosystem.

Due to geographic disparities, very small players are unable to access MercadoLi-
bre’s logistics networks as distribution lines that connect sellers to the platform are
only accessible in more developed areas. As MercadoLibre becomes the dominant
e-commerce platform in Latin America, not being part of the platform’s ecosystem
can result in high opportunity costs for those who are unconnected.

22 PLATFORM PLANET
BRAZIL Bits and Film: Policy For Digital Platforms in
Media and Audio Visual Markets in Brazil
Mariana Valente & Maria Luciano

What?
Study of the impact of digital platforms on the Brazilian audiovisual market and regulation
of VoD in the country.

How?
Legal-policy analysis and interviews with different sectoral players to explore their
interests and motivations.

Insights
The Brazilian media industry, especially independent productions, have depended
on state investments, which in turn rely on the taxation of the audio-visual market.
However, VoD platforms are currently not subject to such taxation.

Regulatory discussions around platforms have largely focused on taxation,

undermining the more complex issues around diversity policies such as preferential
treatment and quotas for national and/or independent content on global platforms
such as Netflix. This has negatively impacted national players, while providing
incentives to VoD players.

Connectivity in Brazil remains geographically and economically unequal, and such

inequalities reflect in the audience makeup for the VoD platform market. With
the acceleration of platformization, this is likely to impact content production and
selection, adversely affecting content diversity.

2019 23
U R U G U AY Peer-to-Peer Lending platforms as Tools for
Financial Inclusion in Uruguay
Mercedes Aguirre & Sandra Garcia-Rivadulla

What?
Study of four Uruguayan P2P Lending platforms – Prezzta, TuTasa, Inversionate and Socius,
and a mapping of the Uruguayan Central Bank’s regulatory process with respect to the
fintech industry.

How?
Interviews with various stakeholders in, and a policy analysis of, the fintech regulatory
landscape in Uruguay.

Insights
The main value addition provided by P2P lending platforms is their credit rating
algorithms, which allow for lower interest rates and higher coverage. They also
facilitate tailor-made borrowing rates for individuals, effectively reducing entry
barriers for small borrowers.

P2P lending platforms in Uruguay have been referred to as the ‘financial Uber’, a
term disliked by market players. This association between Uber and fintech plat-
forms is likely to have influenced the Central Bank’s regulatory approach, resulting
in stricter regulations and an eventual clamp-down on these platforms.

The current regulatory uncertainty around fintech is stifling the creation of new
business, as well as limiting the potential benefits for underserved populations and
SMEs that could have borrowed on P2P lending platforms on better terms. This
could end up clearing the way for big global players such as Google, Facebook or
Amazon to overtake the sector.

24 PLATFORM PLANET
CANADA Data Power Structures in the Goods Sharing
Sector in Vancouver, Canada
Katherine Reilly & Carol Munoz

What?
Exploration of two goods sharing platforms in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada to
understand their approach to data collection and management, and implications for the
emerging data regime in Canada.

How?
Policy analysis of emerging data regime through interviews with Canadian privacy experts
and case study analysis of two platforms - Thingery and UrbanShare - using walkthrough
and data audit techniques.

Insights
Data gathering for audience, pricing and inventory intelligence may enable
goods sharing platforms operating under a circular economy logic to improve
their intermediation of transactions and achieve network effects in particular
marketplaces.

The pressures of competitive advantage and privacy law stipulations have led both
platforms, Thingery and Urbanshare, to view data as an operational resource that
cannot be shared. Ironically, this means that data sourced from the community, for
the purpose of providing a service to the community, cannot be used to improve
community systems by either the members of that community, or the other actors
who are working to serve it.

Canada’s data policies overlook the potential of platforms to tackle over-

consumption of cheap consumer goods imported from low wage markets, because
they are focused on strategically situating Canadian companies as the gatekeepers
of new platformized nodes on the global stage, including vis-a-vis those same low
wage markets.

2019 25
UK Data Policies: Regulatory Approaches for Data-
driven Platforms in the UK and EU
Arne Hintz & Jessica Brand

What?
Review of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK Investigatory Pow-
ers (IP) Act and Digital Economy (DE) Act in the particular national and regional jurisdiction
of the UK to examine how such laws shape, constrain or advance citizens’ control over data
that concerns them and that affects their lives.

How?
Document analysis of the data policy landscape in the UK and semi structured interviews
with diverse stakeholders.

Insights
There are limits to individual approaches to data regulation, as data denotes the
individual’s place within a broader collective. Data, in that sense, is only ever valu-
able in relation to others. This is apparent in case of the categorizations, rankings
and risk scores, where resources are allocated based on the comparison between
individuals. Yet, current policy frameworks continue to focus solely on personal
data and individual privacy.

The debate on ethical data use and the protections afforded by the GDPR may
actually turn attention away from questions (and risks) of data collection. The spe-
cific mechanisms for enhancing user control by the GDPR, such as data portability,
only apply to personal data. This excludes combinations of this data with data from
other sources and inferred or derived data, which is more valuable.

While, so far, platforms have been enjoying freedoms for self-regulating user data
collection, they are now subject to two parallel developments: Increased require-
ments for data access and data sharing by state institutions, and emerging calls for
enhancing citizen control over data.

A citizen-oriented policy framework requires both user empowerment and robust

legal restrictions for the collection and use of data.

26 PLATFORM PLANET
B E L G I U M , I TA LY, F R A N C E Protection of Users in the Platform Economy:
A European Perspective
Cynthia Delronge, Rossana Ducato, Anne-Grace Kleczewski, Enguerrand
Marique, Alain Strowel, Céline Wattecamps

What?
Analysis of legal systems related to platforms in Europe, focusing particularly on Belgium,
France and Italy.

How?
Online surveys, interviews and case studies of platform users in the transport and accom-
modation sectors to understand consumer issues, and stakeholder consultations to under-
stand labor issues.

Insights
The informational power of platforms gives them complete control over price-
setting and manipulation of users towards certain preferred outcomes that benefit
the platform. Platform users find themselves without enforceable access to clear
customer policies on their engagement with the platform, including on issues such
as privacy policies and customer support.

Categorized as ‘self-employed’, platform workers face precarious employment,

which is further exacerbated by their spatial and temporal dispersion and
consequent difficulty in organization and collective action.

Platforms create new forms of interactions and the traditional relationship

between the service provider, the recipient, and the intermediary agent takes on
new dimensions where the roles and responsibilities of platforms are often unclear.
Therefore, while existing legislation needs to be enforced better over the platform
economy, more platform-relevant regulation also needs to be developed.

2019 27
Think Pieces
Show Me the Money! Worker Well-being on Labor Platforms in India
Urvashi Aneja & Aishwarya Sridhar
Much of the discussion on worker well-being and fair working conditions in the platform
economy is dominated by the experiences of workers and markets in industrialized economies.
Different disciplinary perspectives on well-being are hence needed to identify the facets that
may be relevant for labor platforms in the Global South. This paper examines the perspectives
of blue-collar workers on ride-hailing and home-service platforms such as Uber, Ola and
Urbanclap in New Delhi, India. The research found that while income was the most important
consideration for workers interviewed, they also had strong concerns about decision latitude,
autonomy, co-worker support and gig insecurity, even if not framed in this language. Workers’
sense of well-being was related to how fair the platform’s terms of engagement seemed and how
well they understood them. The paper also observes that workers tend not to frame well-being
in the language of legal/formal entitlements but in terms of their past informal work experiences
and those of their peers.

See, Nudge, Control and Profit: Digital Platforms as Privatized Epistemic

Infrastructures
Laura Mann & Gianluca Iazzolino
This paper explores the various ways in which digital platforms are reshaping competitive
knowledge production systems within economies. It argues that while digital platforms have
certain technological features that pose ‘developmental challenges’, political perceptions and
coalitions will shape how each society responds to these technological affordances. Knowledge
is not a benign thing shared openly and evenly across the globe. It is competitive. It structures
economic rivalry between rich and poor countries. It determines trade positions. It shapes
income levels and living standards. It influences who has power over property rights and who
determines the rules of the economic game. On the one hand, national economies are competing
with other national economies over the ‘knowledge surplus’ within the global economy, but
on the other hand, actors within each national economy are competing over how that surplus
is distributed across classes and social groups. Thus, in order to understand the impacts of
information and communication technology on the global economy, we must understand
the competitive and commercially driven nature of knowledge production systems both
internationally and domestically.

28 PLATFORM PLANET
Regulating Digital Media Platforms: Challenges and Initiatives in Thailand
Supinya Klangnarong
In 2017, Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission warned all
major ‘Over-the- top’ (OTT) media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube and Netflix to register
in Thailand, threatening to ban advertisements on their platforms if they failed to do so. This
regulatory approach was criticized from different positions, by the online platforms themselves,
but also civil society actors who feared that this was an attempt to curb freedom of expression
in the country. This paper tracks the various regulatory challenges and failures emerging in
the platform economy in the context of Thailand’s fragile democracy. In doing so, it highlights
the contentious nature of regulation when dealing with the expansion of the digital economy
in states where civil liberties are an easy target. While the need for regulation to govern the
unchecked power of big tech companies from the Global North has been recognized, this paper
argues for alternative approaches which do not necessarily compromise human rights, such as
the creation of ‘regulatory sandboxes’.

Tipping the Scale: Notes on the Topologies of Big Data Platforms

Maya Ganesh
This essay explores scale in terms of how it is shaped, and what it shapes in the context of digital
platforms. The ambitions to scale and the metrics by which scale is known are particular fictions
that enable a big data platform to function. When we examine scale in terms of optimization, we
tend to think of scale in opposition to context, weaponizing the notion of ‘context’ in order to
deliver goods and services calculated to be the most profitable. Another way to think about scale
may be to consider platforms for the aberrant practices of citizenship, governance, politics and
economics they create. We may then be able to rethink the imaginaries of power and agency that
platforms shape.

The Rise of Ant Financial: The Double Articulation of ‘Platformization’ and

‘Infrastructuralization’ in China
Hong Shen
This paper looks at the recent rise of Ant Financial, an affiliate fintech company of the
Chinese Alibaba group, to elucidate the double articulation of “platformization” and
“infrastructuralization” in China. The paper highlights three cases – the Alipay dispute in 2011,
the Yu’ebao drama in 2013 and the monetization of Sesame Credit in 2016. In doing so, it
foregrounds three vital types of power dynamics that have animated and characterized Chinese-
style “platform capitalism”. These include the complex interactions between transnational capital
and state entities, the fierce power struggles between private and state capital, as well as the
often-contradictory imperatives between basic infrastructures that offer services of great public
value and private platforms that primarily pursue profits.

2019 29
CHAPTER 2
2019 31
 Unravelling platformization
Discussion of findings

In our research framework, we started with an understanding of

platforms as “digital infrastructures” (Srnicek, 2017) — “a set of digital
frameworks for social and marketplace interactions (Kenny & Zysman,
2016).”

Through our study, we proceeded to examine how platformization

mediates a shift in the terms of such interactions. Our findings show
that platforms restructure socio-economic relations, with far-reaching
consequences for the real economy.

As network-data architectures that orchestrate production and

exchange, platforms comprise new modes of value creation and
distribution. Three inter-related aspects emerge as significant in our
analysis:

• Platformization represents the movement from ‘size scale’

economies to ‘intelligence-scale’ economies.
• Emerging as the defining ‘infrastructures of value’, platforms effect
a paradigmatic shift in global economic organization.
• Outcomes of platformization are firmly located within the
international political economy of data and development.
Platformization
In the following sections, we discuss these aspects further.
can be uniquely
regional, national 2.1 Varied trajectories of platformization
or local, with the Finding: Platforms emerge from varying historical contexts,
historical contexts economic motivations and development choices

of development Platformization processes follow varied trajectories that are

contingent on a number of factors. While dominant models from
playing a significant the US and China have a large global footprint, platformization can
be uniquely regional, national or local, with the historical contexts
role in shaping the
of development playing a significant role in shaping the course of
course of platforms platforms.

32 PLATFORM PLANET
a) Dominant models: Propped up by a mix of favorable conditions The Chinese state
—public investments in military research that contributed to the
building of the internet, availability of highly skilled human resources, has provided major
the growth of geographic hubs of innovation and an ideology widely
known as Californian libertarianism—US tech companies have enjoyed impetus for the
a head start in the global digital arena, garnering a near-unbeatable
growth of China’s
competitive advantage. Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Facebook
and Amazon have rapidly grown into monopolies riding on network home-grown
effects and amassing data on a global scale. In global trade debates, the
Big Tech lobby has fiercely guarded its territory, advocating for a single platform giants
global digital market supported by unrestrained technology and data
flows (UNCTAD, 2018).
through a state-
capital alliance
Our research also points to the unique pathways of the Chinese model.
Under the current leadership of President Xi Jinping, China’s long-
standing preoccupation with techno-nationalism has found new vigor
in the idea of internet sovereignty (Chen et al., 2019; Shen, 2019).
Having heavily filtered and regulated access to the global internet,
the Chinese state has focused on developing its domestic digital and
data infrastructure. Through initiatives such as the Belt and Road
Initiative and the Digital Silk Route, China has also sought to expand
its manufacturing and export market advantage through aggressive
expansion of infrastructure that is integrated with digital layers (Chen
et al., 2019).

Alongside these direct investments in infrastructure, the Chinese state

has also provided major impetus for the growth of China’s home-grown
platform giants through a state-capital alliance (Chen, et al., 2019).
E-commerce company Alibaba aims to become an indispensable
infrastructure of the Chinese economy, just like water, electricity and
land (Shen, 2019). Like Alibaba’s other financial endeavors, Sesame
Credit has been developed under the encouragement of the Chinese
government. In 2015, China’s central bank issued a notice to allow
domestic digital platforms to develop pilot programs on social credit.
Sesame Credit was born in this supportive policy environment and
has soon become one of the dominant players, largely relying upon
Alibaba’s 400 million users, as well as its deep connections with
various government bureaus. For example, apart from transaction data
collected from its own platforms, Sesame Credit has also been able to
integrate data from critical state agencies to its system, including the
data from the Ministry of Public Security (Shen, 2019).

2019 33
The Silicon Valley b) Developing country models: The Silicon Valley model of digital
disruption, spun as a story purely of unrelenting enterprise (despite
model thrives on evidence to the contrary), is widely evangelized as the winning formula
for innovation in developing nations in Africa and Asia. But the model
barriers to entry is hard to replicate, especially as it hinges on the capture of global
such as IP and is markets and seamless access to and enclosure of data by dominant
platforms (UNCTAD, 2018). The model also thrives on barriers to
reinforced by global entry such as IP and is reinforced by Global North interests (Mann
& Iazzolino, 2019) through a pervasive double-speak of ‘do as I say
north interests and not as I do’. While US Big Tech forcefully argues for developing
nations to be open to free markets and competition, their country
representatives continue to protect the former’s first mover advantage
and entrenched network effects in global negotiations (Gurumurthy &
Bharthur, 2018; Singh, 2018).

We find that platforms in developing countries innovate from vastly

differing starting points, invariably working to create a market where
structural disadvantages have to be tackled head on. As reflected in
our research, developing country contexts are not attractive for big
global platform players given poor digital and other infrastructural
conditions. This has opened up the experimental ground for
endogenous models led by local entrepreneurship. In Argentina,
e-commerce giant MercadoLibre has filled in for public infrastructure
by investing in the development of roads to sustain distribution
networks for its activities and developed private logistics solutions to
piggy-back on the national mail system. This has been the only way for
the platform to overcome the colonial structures of centre to capillary
models of connectivity51(Artopoulos, 2019). In the Philippines,
expensive broadband and poor connectivity have led to platforms
adopting an ‘amphibian’ characteristic. What are purely digital layers in
other countries such as booking gigs, become manually intermediated
at the back-end in the case of home-service platforms (Barrameda et
al., 2019).

As African economies deal with premature de-industrialization

(Rodrik, 2016)6 , their capacity to feed domestic demand for goods and
2

services is declining, especially in countries like Nigeria where high

5 Designed to connect the capital city to various nodes without factoring in connectivity
between smaller places
6 Developing countries, Rodrick asserts “have experienced falling manufacturing shares in
both employment and real value added, especially since the 1980s”.

34 PLATFORM PLANET
purchasing power has led to the creation of a giant retail economy
fuelled by Chinese goods (McKinsey, 2013). There is currently
consumption-led growth without production capacity, largely through
trade with China. In fact, Jumia, a pan African e-commerce platform
has set up sourcing operations in the city of Shenzen (Liao, 2018).
Platforms such as Jumia and Konga are hailed as success stories that
work despite the unfavorable factors. However, their potential for
growth is predicated on a taken-for-granted dependence on Chinese
goods and e-commerce platforms, and also hampered due to deficits
in connectivity, logistics and banking. Current e-commerce actors in
Africa are therefore unable to scale and do not have the capacity to
process more than 5000 orders per day (Ogunyemi et al., 2019).

Countries like India have adopted a mixed approach, creating digital

platforms as a basic infrastructural layer provisioned by public
investment (UNCTAD, 2018). National policies have adopted a public
goods approach, while also keeping room for private innovation and
allowing for foreign capital and investments. IndiaStack, a set of open
APIs created as a data infrastructure layer by different public bodies,
is used by both public and private entities to build various applications.
An instant real-time payment system, the Unified Payments Interface
(UPI), has been developed by National Payments Corporation of
India to facilitate inter-bank transactions and this has emerged as an
important layer for all mainstream digital platforms. FarmerZone,
which aims to provide Indian farmers with real-time input and market
data, and e-NAM, an online public marketplace for agricultural
commodities, are other examples of digital public goods in agriculture
(Gurumurthy & Bharthur, 2019). Both serve as critical alternatives to
the collection and privatization of agricultural data by big companies
like Monsanto, who are in the process of developing digital platforms
for agri-services (Plume, 2016). Countries like India

What we note is that platformization in these home-grown models

have adopted a
may not necessarily be anchored to local development concerns and mixed approach,
priorities.
creating digital
• Big regional players like MercadoLibre in Latin America who have
become powerful super platforms with many affordances (see
platforms that
Table 5) and an ability to tackle local infrastructural deficits, are function as public
somewhat rare. The rhetoric of entrepreneurship and e-commerce
as a means to achieving digital transformation obscures the fact goods

2019 35
 that platformization by and large is characterized by the first
mover advantage, and subsequent market consolidation through
data capture on a global scale.

• The real economy connection, as for instance, in Africa may

be weak. E-commerce platforms in Africa are typically caught
between domestic de-industrialization and poor infrastructure
on the one hand and volatile currency fluctuations and a nascent
financial system on the other, having to rely on Chinese imports
and operate in high risk market conditions (Liao, 2018).

On the other hand, policy intervention can also create the building
blocks for digital industrialization that will incentivize digital
E-commerce entrepreneurship and reboot traditional sectors like agriculture.
The India model is instructive for how domestic capacity for digital
platforms in Africa transformation, especially in developing countries, depends on certain
operate in a basic digital and data infrastructure provisioned through a public
goods model.
context of domestic
c) Alternative models: While the global platform economy is
de-industrialization dominated by transnational corporations, platform architectures
also support alternatives such as the solidarity economy or the social
enterprise model. UrbanShare is a for-profit platform that gathers data
to authenticate users, crowdsource product information, establish
trust and communications between users and manage payments. The
platform thus eliminates “pain points” within community transactions,
all the while attempting to further a model of collaborative
consumption (Reilly & Nieves, 2019). In India, social enterprise
platforms such as Ekgaon and Vrutti, which work with farmer producer
companies have successfully demonstrated the communitization of
value in platform ecosystems through ethical data brokerage practices
that allow farmers at the edges to secure fair prices in commodity
markets (Gurumurthy & Bharthur, 2019). In Indonesia, trade unions
and business consortia are building their own platform to connect
hotels with tourism agencies, promote sustainable tourism and enrich
the local economy (Bentley & Maharika, 2019).

While alternatives work in small pockets, they face many challenges.

LGCC is a social enterprise platform for domestic workers in the
Philippines, aiming to support workers from the LGBTQ community
and women. LGCC charges a significantly higher service fee compared

36 PLATFORM PLANET
to their competitors to be able to pay their workers a decent wage
and also provide workers with necessary equipment. However, this
strategy has reduced the platform’s popularity, reflective of the fact
that alternative models find it much harder to sustain their operations.
Platforms in sectors like car-pooling such as Gomyways in Africa
have tried and failed, not being able to find the resource backing
to keep going (Ogunyemi et al., 2019). The norm in the platform
economy, as we have also seen with aggregators like Uber, is to wipe
out competition through predatory and anti-competitive practices or
cannibalistic acquisitions.

Further, small platforms offering free services, like Ridygo and

Warmshowers, which rely on self-governance standards, are unable
to afford the costs of regulatory compliance (Delronge et al., 2019). If Alternative platform
these platforms are held liable for a breach of trust like a data security
mishap, they are not likely to be able to pay the fine or legal fees. models not built
for scale or
Alternative platform models not built for scale or inspired primarily
by public/social value creation thus face an uphill path to success. In inspired primarily
the case of Europe and Canada they have to grapple with regulatory
burdens imposed by emerging data governance regimes modelled for by public/ social
large players (Delronge et al., 2019). Smaller players in developing
value creation face
countries face a hostile situation, having to find their feet or perish
amidst the Goliaths in the platform economy backed by venture capital. an uphill path to
While public investments into digital and data infrastructure and/or
affirmative public policy support for smaller platforms in such contexts success
can boost their viability, the dominant policy discourse around data
delegitimizes such measures as undesirable protectionism.

What our findings confirm is that there is no one-size-fits-all when it

comes to platform-led economic pathways. Within and among nation-
states, the socio-economic and political context, digital capacity,
traditional competitive advantage and specific choices with regard to
platform ownership, value distribution and actor-network governance
distinguish platform types.

2019 37
Big platform 2.2 The intelligence premium
companies have Finding: Platforms work to recursively create and
used intelligence- consolidate the intelligence premium
scale economies Traditional ties of market and societal intermediation that had once
rested on kinship, patronage, community or council have today given
to entrench
way in a globalized context to new value chains. In this global system,
themselves platforms become the new interlocutor combining network effects
and data-based intelligence. As the once-static technologies that drove
and build a productivity and managed labor now become dynamic (think global
networks of data flows), competitive advantage shifts to a new value
monopolistic proposition.
advantage
Technologies at the base of productivity and labor performance
in traditional size-scale economies were mechanical. In emerging
intelligence-scale economies, network effects combine with an agile
algorithmic apparatus, fusing manual tasks and cognitive functions
(Fumagalli et al., 2019), optimizing this ecosystem of interconnected
nodes unceasingly for profit maximization. Thus, the value proposition
in economies of intelligence involves transferring mental processes
and skill requirements away from workers and onto the platform
infrastructure (Mann & Iazzolino, 2019).

Within the larger neoliberal capitalist system, big platform companies

have used intelligence-scale economies to entrench themselves and
build a monopolistic advantage. They have continuously honed their
‘network-data advantage’ to expand their current business as well as
diversify into new sectors.

This is true for digital companies such as Google and Amazon, and
also increasingly, for large transnational corporations in other sectors,
such as Walmart in retail or Syngenta in agriculture. So rapid is this
trend that by 2025, it is estimated that 30 percent of global economic
activity, approximately $60 trillion in revenues, will be mediated by
digital platforms (McKinsey, 2018). Deloitte (2018) has predicted that
by 2019, 70 percent of companies will acquire AI capabilities through
cloud-based enterprise software, as having vast amounts of connected
data points can open up the potential for AI in unprecedented ways.

Content and media platforms such as Facebook and Google have

38 PLATFORM PLANET
reaped the benefits of social transaction data generated by millions of
users. More than 80 percent of the content people watch on Netflix
is discovered through the platform’s algorithmic recommendation
systems, which uses personal data from its network of subscribers
to push content. Viewers’ content consumption practices are broken
down to microscopic levels – including the number of pauses in a given
show – and such data then informs in-house content production as well
as external licensing agreements. Further, such data is combined with
other data gathered through resource intensive annotation to feed
into machine learning (Valente & Luciano, 2019).

Similarly, P2P lending platforms are able to use financial intelligence

gathered through user data and public datasets, for gaining a network
of borrowers and lenders (Aguirre & Garcia-Rivadulla, 2019). In
2017, Chinese ride-hailing platform DiDi handled 20 to 25 million
ride requests on a daily basis, carried out by four million drivers, thus
processing 2,000 terabytes of data (Sawers, 2017, as cited in Chen,
et al., 2019). DiDi has used its data to expand to a wide range of
urban transport services in Chinese cities – taxis, private cars, bike-
sharing and smart traffic systems, thus datafying the urban transport
ecosystem and placing “itself at the center of the converging networks
of information, traffic, and transactions” (Chen, et al., 2019).

Building on its successful e-commerce empire and investments in IoT,

Alibaba’s ‘ET agricultural brain’ AI platform (Business Wire, 2018)
aims to provide intelligence based products and solutions and onboard
various agricultural actors – seed companies, farmers, farm machinery
Platforms who
companies – posing a real threat to traditional actors in the domain
are first movers
Established companies have also made forays into the platform model
in an effort to take back a share of the market. For instance, the success reap ‘intelligence
of Netflix in Brazil has prompted domestic telcos and broadcasters
such as Globo,Telecine and Sky to start their own streaming platforms
premium’, which
(Valente & Luciano, 2019). is aggrandized
Regardless of whether companies start as digital enterprises or through the
become digitalized, economies of intelligence in the current global
context propel an ever growing network-data advantage. In the pre-
totalizing control
platform context, firms realized an innovation or knowledge premium they have over the
(Mann & Iazzolino, 2019) when they adopted new technologically
restructured business processes and became the first movers to network-data layers

2019 39
 disrupt the economic equilibrium. Today, platforms who are first
movers reap ‘intelligence premium’, which is aggrandized through the
totalizing control they have over the network-data layers (See Figure
1).

We find that platforms use their intelligence premium to grow their

ecosystems in the following ways:

a) Building interconnections across sectors and economic activities:

By spreading their operations across different market segments
and acquiring multiple capabilities, platforms entrench themselves
in the digital economy. They become multi-functional and sticky,
encompassing innumerable applications. Chinese super platforms
WeChat and Meituan-Dianping are early exemplars that combine
multiple features such as news, entertainment, restaurant reviews,
food delivery and ride-hailing along with cross-cutting applications
such as payment systems and digital wallets (Chen, et al., 2019).
Similarly, travel platform TripAdvisor combines several features such
as listing, ratings and reviews of attractions, hotels and restaurants,
message boards for peer to peer discussions, also acting as a gateway
for other travel booking platforms such as Booking.com, Traveloka and
Expedia (Bentley & Maharika, 2019). Yu’ebo, Ant Financial’s fintech
investment service offers higher interest rates than traditional bank
deposits, and allows users to transfer and withdraw their shopping
funds or revenues from its payment counterpart, Alipay, without
penalty (Shen, 2019).

Table 5. The sticky layers of MercadoLibre

Mercado Pago Payment gateway

Mercado Shops Online storefront

Mercado Envíos Logistics

Mercado Libre Publicidad Adtech services

Mercado Créditos Fintech loans for platform sellers

Mercado Puntos Customer loyalty tool

Mercado Fondos Virtual wallet

40 PLATFORM PLANET
MercadoLibre uses Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as
a way to strengthen its platform operations, inviting independent
software developers to create and implement solutions for expanding
the platform’s reach (See Table 5).

To date, the platform has created a payments system, virtual wallet,

logistics solution, adtech service, fintech and alternative finance
solutions, and a customer loyalty program (Artopoulos & Rivoir, 2019).

In less mature markets, platforms use hybrid strategies (offline-online,

product-service) to build interconnections for value maximization. For
instance, Clean zone, a Philippines based care work platform is cashing
in on the successes of its home-cleaning services and expanding into Where platforms
the retail business, with its own line of cleaning solutions (Barrameda
et al., 2019). once served as
marketplaces for
b) Privatization and capture of the market: Where platforms once
served as marketplaces for aggregation or intermediation of services, aggregation or
today they are increasingly seen as markets in themselves. On account
of platformization, the market becomes a privatized economic sphere intermediation
with redefined terms and rules of engagement.
of services,
For one, platforms have enormous and almost unilateral price setting today they are
power (Delronge et al., 2019), dynamically pushing costs up or down
on the basis of algorithmic intelligence to an extent where price increasingly seen
signaling, a fundamental tenet of the market system, fails entirely.
Automated price variation means that players dependent on the
as markets unto
platform are never quite aware of the terms of the transaction, except themselves
in real-time. Additionally, on ride-hailing platforms, for instance, user
design aspects often forces user-attention towards confirming the
transaction, rather than scrutinizing the price (Delronge et al., 2019).
Platforms are able to exploit information asymmetry in other ways
through specific techno-architectures, including misrepresenting
supply and demand of goods and services, hyper-segmenting
consumers, eliminating geographies that do not seem lucrative and
constantly nudging users towards particular behavior.

All these trends point to market capture that traditional competition

and anti-trust regulation fail to tackle. Not only are current laws
inadequate, but they also burden less powerful actors in the ecosystem
with the disproportionate costs of seeking redress. This allows

2019 41
The unholy platforms to circumvent established rules and policy safeguards,
whether with respect to consumer protection, labor rights, or more
marriage between recently, data protection laws such as the GDPR. While recent
discourse has brought these concerns into the limelight, data
venture capital protection continues to be a weak area of enforcement, and many
and tech giants companies continue to not comply with the GDPR, considering fines as
simply the cost of doing business, as the profits even out the losses in
has ensured that the longer run (Hintz & Brand, 2019).

global capital c) Financialization of the platform model: The unholy marriage

flows remain between venture capital and tech giants has ensured that global
capital flows today remain concentrated among a small group of
concentrated actors through a cannibalistic swallowing up or elimination of smaller
competition. For instance, TripAdvisor has in the past four years
acquired cruise-booking, home-rental and travel planning platforms,
and more recently, has also diversified into food-tech, investing in
startups such as Fork and Eatigo (Tech Crunch, 2018).

Venture Capital (VC) investments into startups may not necessarily

contribute to the local economy, notwithstanding all the hype around
innovation and entrepreneurship. Through a relentless cash burn,
VCs allow platforms to play the long game, eroding competition and
facilitating market capture, even when profits are not in sight. For
instance, DiDi, one of the most successful platforms in the world has
failed to generate any net profits since its foundation (Chen, et al.,
2019). In May 2019, ride-hailing platform Uber went public on the
New York Stock Exchange, confident of hitting a valuation of $120
billion. However, the company dashed all expectations a week after it
issued its Initial Public Offering (IPO), losing more in share value than
any publicly traded stock since 1975 (New York Times, 2019). Often,
financial actors also prefer to back the winning side by watching and
gaming investment portfolios that they create.

States in the Global South are highly dependent on global capital to

build their budding platform ecosystems. Most leading platforms in
India for example, are funded through global VC capital. Softbank,
a leading financial player in the digital economy has invested in Ola
(ride-hailing), Oyo (accommodation booking) and Paytm (digital
payments) (Mint, 2019). Syngenta has funded agri-platform Ninjacart
(Gurumurthy & Bharthur, 2019). China is an exception to this trend.
Although Chinese platforms including Alibaba received large sums of

42 PLATFORM PLANET
foreign money during the late 1990s and early 2000s, more recently
the platform economy was restructured to be wholly-owned by
Chinese nationals through entities such as Ant Financial (Shen, 2019).

d) Centralizing intelligence: Platforms use big data and digital

intelligence to expand and optimize a totalizing control in the following
ways:

Gatekeeping market participation: Digital platforms allow new

markets to emerge where none existed earlier, plugging the lack
of information that previously resulted in a ‘missing market’
(Akerlof, 1970)71and creating the necessary trust infrastructure.
In the platform economy therefore, an ever-expanding possibility
for connections enables new forms of exchange. As the research
reveals, this could potentially create a basis for collaborative
consumption. The social platform Warmshowers, for example,
allows hikers and bicyclists to connect with people who are
willing to offer up their homes for showers (Delronge et al., 2019).
Hyper-local platforms for goods sharing in the city of Vancouver
are another instantiation of a sharing economy (Reilly & Nieves,
2019).

The affordances of digital platforms for bridging information

asymmetry and multiplying connections, however, has mostly
given rise to exploitative business models. Fintech platforms use
their immense algorithmic prowess to rank and sort potential Digital platforms
borrowers, including only those deemed ‘worthy’ (Mann & allow new markets
Iazzolino, 2019). In Uruguay, P2P lending platform Prezzta
eliminates over 85 percent of loan applications that are deemed to emerge where
high risk by its algorithmic apparatus (Aguirre & Garcia-Rivadulla,
2019). none existed
earlier by plugging
The research also found that in Indonesia, when Booking.com first
launched, the platform sent representatives to take appealing lack of information
photographs and onboard home-stays who initially saw good
returns from the arrangement. However, as more and more and creating
properties began to self-enlist on the platform, all local businesses
were left completely dependent on the platform’s algorithms for
infrastructures of
consumer traffic (Bentley & Maharika, 2019). trust
7 A missing market or ‘market for lemons’ where competitive exchanges become impossible
given that quality of goods and services cannot be differentiated.

2019 43
 Eliminating competition: Big data and algorithmic capacities
are used by platforms to consolidate market power through
micro-surveillance and micro-management of different member
nodes or constituent actors in the network. Uber for instance
has awarded higher bonuses to double-appers – drivers offering
services to both Lyft and Uber – in some cities, ensuring that these
drivers drove for Uber and not Lyft, thus distorting upstream
conditions to limit Lyft’s ability to offer services to end consumers
(Anchustegui & Nowag, 2017). By deploying the intelligence
mined from transactions data on its digital marketplace, Amazon
often indulges in predatory pricing and deep discounting of
its private labels. This is part of a larger strategy to edge out
competition from independent third-party sellers (Khan, 2016).

Commodifying human experience: The totalizing hold of platforms

over the market hinges on continuing surveillance of consumer
The totalizing hold behavior and a tireless strive to improve upon the consumption
of platforms over experience, reduce the consumer’s pain points and enhance
individual gratification. The consumer does not simply order
the market hinges an item off an e-commerce website anymore. She has access
to reviews and ratings on various options, product and price
on continuing comparison, multiple shipping options and loyalty program
surveillance of perks, real-time tracking of the item in transit, not to mention
easy returns and replacements and mechanisms to input her
consumer behavior satisfaction level. The consumption experience on the platform
is heightened with newer and newer data-based strategies,
which allow for hyper-personalization as in the case of Netflix’s
recommendation system (Valente & Luciano, 2019). Platforms
offer omni-channel transaction and distribution using integrated
data infrastructure for seamless experiences across devices
and channels (Gurumurthy & Bharthur, 2019). Thus, through
systematic datafication and algorithmic intervention, platforms
commodify the human experience, moving products into the
emerging zone of product-service hybrids

e) Concentration as end game: A global economy that is rapidly

digitalizing is witness to increased consolidation of power in the hands
of a few corporations – the rise of giant technology companies and
enterprises that have grown bigger and bigger through the integration
of digital layers, services and platforms in traditional sectors.
UNCTAD’s (2018) Trade and Development Report points to how

44 PLATFORM PLANET
value creation and accumulation in supply chains is now controlled by
economic actors who can bring in digitally enabled elements. Consider
the fact that today, seven out of the ten most valuable companies in the
world are driven through the platform model (Schenker, 2019). Also,
platform companies widely employ discursive tactics – presenting
themselves in win-win terms and circumventing regulatory oversight
(See Box 1).

Their data advantage also allows technology companies to move

nimbly and buy out potential competitors. TripAdvisor, faced with
stagnating returns on its operations, has attempted to reinvent itself
through new lines of acquisition, as has been previously discussed.
Widening pools of invaluable data also enable tech giants to make
calculated leaps into new markets. In 2016, Alibaba partnered with
the SAIC Motor Corporation to jointly develop driverless cars, and
also collaborated with the state-owned oil interest Sinopec on Big
Data analytics and information security, thus making inroads into Budding platform
transportation and energy (Shen, 2019). hubs in developing
This means budding platform hubs in developing/periphery nations, nations, struggle
struggling with regulatory deficits, risk losing out to established large
technology companies who can simply swoop in and take over an with regulatory
emerging market whether that be a nascent on-demand care work
deficits and
market like in the Philippines (Barrameda et al., 2019) or the case of
fintech in Uruguay where the stifling of local business could mean risk losing out
an easier entry point for bigger foreign firms in the future (Aguirre &
Garcia-Rivadulla, 2019). to established

Smaller/mid-tier platforms which do survive tend to become

large technology
dependent on larger platforms. In the tourism sector, a clear companies
dependence is visible between major platforms that offer multiple
services under one roof, such as TripAdvisor and Lonely Planet and
platforms such as Expedia, which depend on the former for traffic
(Bentley & Maharika, 2019).

2019 45
 Figure 2. Platformization and the New Epoch of Economic Organization

46 PLATFORM PLANET
Box 1. Platform myths explained

Platforms represent the exalted promise of “a progressive and egalitarian arrangement” (Gilles-
pie, 2010, p. 350, as cited in Ganesh, 2019). They co-opt narratives of inclusion and opportunity
for smaller players, and in their self-representation often cast themselves as linear, transparent,
objective and efficient – creating the myth of no-fuss convenience in ways that do not account for
their topological complexity and expanse (Ganesh, 2019).

Self-identification as mere ‘intermediaries’

Platforms refer to themselves as mere connectors/intermediaries/aggregators in relation
to law and policy, and portray themselves as neutral agents in the phenomenon (Cohen,
2017). Perpetuating a deliberate vagueness about their business identity, they distinguish
themselves from traditional players, thus seeking to be exempt from the rules applicable in
the domain. In Brazil, Netflix has for years avoided sector-specific taxes as well as diversity
stipulations applicable to other traditional media actors through these strategies. A model
for taxing was finally agreed within the government, but it has not yet been enacted into law
(Valente & Luciano, 2019).

Efficiency narratives to co-opt actors into the ecosystem

Pasquale (2016. p.309, as cited in Mare et al., 2019) notes that platforms use narratives
of efficiency, which include the reduction of transaction costs and the expansion of
opportunities for individuals as ways to promote uptake and adoption. The platform
economy is thus flattened out as an open terrain of abundant opportunity for the individual
entrepreneurial agent. E-commerce companies often use ‘inclusion washing’ tactics –
invoking the language of empowerment for women, rural producers etc. – to successfully
gain entry into new markets. The reality however is that participation is a one way street
and the terms of inclusion into the platform ecosystem often comes with higher costs and
lower returns for smaller actors (See Section 2.3 (b) for more on this).

The fallacy of the flexible gig

“Work for yourself: Drive when you want, make money you need. Set your own schedule.
Make money on your own terms. Let the app lead the way. Watch the money add up fast,”
(Mare et al., 2019), and “Take orders with liberty and extra money made easy...” (Chen et
al., 2019) are some examples of how platforms such as Uber (in South Africa) and Meituan
(in China) appeal to workers to sign up for gigs. There is however a fundamental disjunct
between how platforms present terms of economic participation for workers and how
on-ground realities pan out. Platforms do not afford workers the protection of formal
employment but still manage to retain control over their amorphous workforce through
algorithmic gaming, labor segmentation and a system of reward and punishment that keeps
workers in line with the platform’s value maximization principle.

2019 47
In the dominant 2.3 Algorithmic optimization
platform
Finding: Platforms use algorithmic optimization to
ecosystem, remediate existing socio-economic relations, expanding or
algorithmic control constraining actor choices

is wielded to In the dominant platform ecosystem, algorithmic control is wielded

to entrench power through various means (See Figure2). While
entrench power platform owners keep increasing their powers, less powerful actors in
the ecosystem (SMEs, consumers, workers) “remain liable for finding
through various remedies in a network of decentralized resources, leaving them overall
means in a weaker situation” (Delronge et al., 2019).

a) Unceasing optimization of member nodes through algorithms:

As “epistemic infrastructures” (Mann & Iazzolino, 2019), platforms
rank and order actors in terms of their value to and position in the
ecosystem (See Box 2). Using opaque algorithms, they game the
system, effecting a state of complete control over how value is
distributed among the actors (See Table 6).

Box 2. Epistemic infrastructures in fintech: an illustration

Safaricom, the leading mobile network operator in Kenya has refashioned M-Agri, an initiative
previously under its CRS division, as Digifarm, a platform that links farmers with a range of agritech
companies including an input provider, a data analytics company and an infomediary operator,
integrating them and making them accessible through a simple USSD menu available on basic mobile
phones. At its most superficial level, Safaricom’s business model pushes the company’s flagship
product, the mobile money system, M-Pesa. Once registered, farmers can apply for a loan and, if
approved, receive vouchers to purchase inputs. The loan is then repaid with interest through M-Pesa.
By integrating different service providers into a single proprietary platform, Safaricom can render
farmers legible and nudge them towards practices that the company considers indicative of ‘virtuous’
borrowers and farmers. The strategy is aimed at increasing predictability, rather than productivity,
while the collection of vast data across the population minimizes the financial risk associated to
farmers. Whether this is a win-win situation for all the parties involved (Safaricom, partners, farmers)
remains to be seen. A growing reliance on their own credit scoring system as the most important key
to access credit may crystallize existing inequalities and conceal structural conditions (such as those
affecting women, with limited access to credit because of lack of collateral).
(Mann & Iazzalino, 2019)

48 PLATFORM PLANET
Figure 2. The Algorithmic ‘Brain’

2019 49
 Table 6. How Algorithms Game Actors

Intended outcome Use-case How algorithmic gaming works

Structuring a market P2P lending Social transaction data is mined to establish lower interest rates
on the basis of social and higher coverage
capital
Panoptic labor Ride-hailing Ride and customer interactions data are monitored and tracked
management to reward and punish drivers
Food delivery Algorithm-dictated time management is used to ensure ‘on-time
completion rate’

Rating and rewards systems are obfuscated to shift the benefits

away from workers

Information Travel Search results are tampered by sponsored content

manipulation
Reviews are scrubbed for unfavorable information on
properties

Proprietary rating systems are not open to listed businesses

Nudging user VoD Users’ content experiences are structured solely through
behavior hyper-personalization

b) Riding on economic and social stratification: Dominant platforms

exploit global-to-local social and marketplace hierarchies, and through
their agile and adaptive techno-economic architecture, exercise
granular control over relationships to maximize and appropriate value.

Platforms reflect Platform mediation exploits existing social and economic

inequalities: Interventions for algorithmic optimization ride on
and reify pre- preexisting inequalities in given socio-economic contexts. For
instance, prima facie gender neutrality on a P2P lending platform
existing inequalities may not help reduce lender bias against women, as historical bias
might continue to prevail (Aguirre & Garcia-Rivadulla, 2019).
in give socio-
Worse, women borrowers on these platforms can be acutely
economic contexts vulnerable to predatory lending practices. In China and many East-

50 PLATFORM PLANET
 Asian countries, P2P lending has acquired notoriously exploitative Platforms assume
shades, with reports emerging of borrowers insisting on holding
on to nude pictures of women as collateral (Vice, 2018). no liability for
The continuing lack of access and know-how in making optimal
use of platforms hampers women’s ability to fully participate
women’s work
in the platform economy. In countries such as the Philippines, place safety but
relative high costs of connectivity create imperfect platform
models in care work. The platformized care work market is are perceived as
not truly disintermediated in the sense of offering open and
agentic access to job opportunities, resulting in a continuation of a good option by
exploitative local contracting systems (Barrameda et al., Aneja & women, given the
Sridhar, 2019).
flexible work hours
Platforms also reflect and reify gender-based occupational
segmentation; women workers are far more prevalent in on- and the opportunity
demand service platforms such as care work (cleaning services)
for earnings and
and beauty, whereas sectors such as ride-hailing and food delivery
are heavily dominated by male workers (Barrameda et al., 2019; higher family status
Aneja & Sridhar, 2019; Chen, et al., 2019; Mare et al., 2019). Even
though platforms assume no liability for women’s work place
safety, they may still be perceived as a good option by women,
given the flexible work hours women seek, the opportunity for
some steady earnings and higher family status they offer.

In South Africa, platforms seem to widen fissures of racial identity,

as is observed in the dynamics that play out in ride-hailing sector.
Platform drivers are largely migrant workers from outside of
the country and face enormous xenophobia from metered taxi
drivers8,1and are othered as ‘job-stealing intruders’. This has
inadvertently meant that despite the higher commission rates,
Uber is their preferred platform. This is because Uber’s consumer
profile comprises middle class white customers who pay via credit
cards, as opposed to Taxify’s black working class consumers who
use cash. In the context of frequent in-transit heists and attacks
from metered taxi drivers, platform drivers feel they are ensured
greater safety of their earnings working for Uber (Mare et al.,
2019).

8 In South Africa, traditional meter taxi drivers have protested and reacted, in some cases
violently, to the interference and disruptions by ride-hailing platforms such as Uber and
Taxify to their business.

2019 51
Travel platforms Geographies become commodified, creating new dependencies,
exclusions and expulsions: Platforms commodify geography in
render invisible various ways, transferring value to and from spaces and places,
creating new inclusions or exclusions in the process. Sites of
anything that platform activity can be understood in two ways; as the physical
cannot fit into the territories of innovation, and as the actor-network transactions
through platform-based engagement. The two are not mutually
platform’s gaze exclusive and may and do overlap. But value concentration is more
noticeable in the former, along with what appears to be a trickle
down effect of the gains. For instance, geographies where the big
platform companies are headquartered, such as Silicon Valley, see
the highest volume of venture capital investments and are marked
by higher levels of innovation, a higher skilled workforce, and also
higher economic output and wages (City Lab, 2018a).

Through algorithmic gaming and the value optimization principle,

platforms identify geographies as valuable or lacking a clear value
proposition, creating extreme dependencies in the process. In
2016, a Bloomberg investigation showed how Amazon Prime’s
same day delivery service was not available in select area codes
that corresponded with predominantly black neighborhoods. A
data-based calculation had led Amazon to conclude that these
areas did not justify the expense of same day deliveries and could,
therefore, be cut out from the service altogether (Ganesh, 2019).

Using a GIS mapping of properties on the island of Yogyakarta,

Bentley and Maharika (2019) found a 98.6 percent coverage
by platforms. The region demonstrates an almost complete
dependence on some kind of travel platform. The research
further found that travel platforms, through their emphasis on
visual marketing (beautiful views, beaches) and the availability of
amenities (concentration of restaurants and resorts) accentuate
existing cleavages that determine what areas are tourism worthy
and what are not. For actors who reside in certain localities that
enjoy these advantages, platforms become a key enabler of
success. For those outside of these locations, prospects become
bleaker, causing people to take measures to integrate themselves
better in the platform economy, as one Lombok92driver did by
moving out his hometown to a place where there were attractive
sights. Travel platforms also render invisible anything that cannot

9 An island in Indonesia

52 PLATFORM PLANET
fit into the platform’s gaze. For instance, street vendors are not
featured/cannot hope to feature their business on platforms as
they do not have a permanent location to reference or could be
outside of tourism thoroughfares. For such actors, platforms
represent a meaningless economic avenue (Bentley & Maharika,
2019), even as they are the most hurt by platform activities.

In such optimization, there is a hollowing out of pockets of

capital accumulation and skill loss from geographies, as skill-
requirements and mental processes that once resided with
labor become displaced by the digital process the platform has
established. Consider how ride-hailing platforms optimize the
transportation services network on a city scale, thereby creating
a situation where “a driver in the ride-sharing app no longer needs
to know the city because the algorithm leads her way” (Mann &
Iazzolino, 2019.p.8). The all-knowing platform shares with the
driver only the bare minimum she needs to know in order to
perform her job satisfactorily.

Thus, as platforms value/devalue geographies through their

techno-social apparatus, what we find is that for actors situated
in the geography, there is an erosion of the right to market
participation.

Despite loss of autonomy, actors are locked-in into the platform

ecosystem: Smaller actors in the platform economy – whether
they are workers, producers, sellers, SMEs or consumers –
negotiate the ecosystem in various ways, engaging with platforms
for opportunities, while constantly making trade-offs.

In the case of e-commerce, sellers seem to acknowledge the

mixed-bag that platforms such as MercadoLibre offer, including
the value they gain from access to new markets, financial services,
logistics and payment methods, while being unable still to grasp SMEs view
the longer term development fallouts of the platformization
process. Even while recognizing the costs that come from having e-commerce
MercadoLibre be the intermediary, SMEs tend to view the new
competition and barriers as an individual, and not a collective,
platforms like
problem (Artopoulos. 2019). MercadoLibre as a
Similarly, SMEs in the tourism sector in Indonesia find that they mixed opportunity

2019 53
Consumers, who must use platforms to gain customers, even with price erosion in
bookings and revenues being a drawback. Not only do they have to
often seem to be pay steep commissions which go upwards of 20 percent, but they
also do not have the benefit of business coming in from walk-ins,
placed in the most patronage, or travel agents, something that they relied on prior to
advantageous platforms. Platforms such as TripAdvisor allow accommodation
facilities, restaurants and other businesses to be reviewed or
position by the tagged without consent of the owner, which means they have little
choice but to be on the platform and exercise some control over
platform are not the narrative. Businesses from the pre-platform era encounter
impervious to a challenging business environment because even if they are
not part of the platform (or make sub-optimal use of it), they are
making trade offs implicated all the same in the tariff wars, which are narrowing
margins of revenue (Bentley & Maharika, 2019).
on platforms
In Brazil, media market actors have pointed out the ways in which
VoD platforms impact the idea of national content through new
economic organization. Although they outsource production
of Brazilian content to domestic studios, they retain control
over the IP, thus firmly entrenching themselves in the country’s
cultural sphere, as the real producers of national content.
For instance, Netflix Originals, recognized as a great creative
production channel for artists and creators, is solely under the
copyright of the platform. Such trends pose important concerns
about diminishing cultural autonomy for creators in the Global
South (Valente & Luciano, 2019) as platformization uses techno-
architectures and dominant knowledge regimes for recarving
audience markets.

Consumers, who often seem to be placed in the most

advantageous position by the platform (often through actively
disadvantaging other actors) are not impervious to making
trade offs on these platforms. Their interaction with platforms
is entirely governed through Terms of Service agreements that
give platforms enormous power in the equation. The consumer
can realistically never hope to enforce his/her rights without
approaching court systems, a predicament that results in the
denial of consumer rights. Yet, consumers feel largely unaffected
by this power imbalance as they regard the costs of convenience
that platforms afford to be more beneficial than the loss of right to
accountable consumer practices (Delronge et al., 2019).

54 PLATFORM PLANET
c) Alternatives that bring new choices: Platforms can and do open
up new opportunities and expand strategic choices for actors. The
disproportionate value capture orchestrated by dominant platform
models does not preclude alternative possibilities for actors, or even
alternative models of platformization. Our research finds that when
platforms pursue strategies of contextualization over that of hyper-
optimization, there can be an expansion of choice for actors.

By disrupting existing labor market conditions, platforms can

bring in new actors: There are instances where the very nature
of platform activity ends up disrupting labor market conditions,
allowing certain actors to leverage the opportunities that emerge.
Travel platforms such as TripAdvisor, which allow people to list
and advertise their services, have been beneficial to women
entrepreneurs in Bali offering services in male-dominated
professions (such as trekking guides). Women have been able to
gain opportunities and also counter bad-mouthing by competing
male guides, thanks to positive ratings and reviews (Bentley &
Maharika, 2019). For others in Indonesia, travel platforms seem
to present a chance to monetize an asset (starting a home-stay)
or skill (offering cooking classes or mask-making workshops).
However, without any assurance or guarantee, it is a daunting
prospect for nascent businesses, who often need to take loans
to finance investments for such initiatives to succeed. In the
context of VoD in Brazil, there is a recognition that platforms
have opened up prestigious avenues for content creation, which
reach international markets and audiences and present new
opportunities for creative professionals to advance better and
faster (Valente & Luciano, 2019). When platforms
Locally embedded platform relationships can result in positive pursue strategies
platform outcomes: In the Global South, where connectivity and
access to /fluency with digital gadgets is not a given, platform
of contextualization
models continue to depend on moderate to high levels of human over
intermediation at the last mile, even if they are algorithmically
centralized in other stages of the operation. In certain sectors hyperoptimization
like agriculture or horticulture, where produce is perishable and
market linkages are weak, supply-side aggregation presents there can be an
unique challenges. Platform businesses therefore need to devise expansion of choice
solutions that are locally appropriate in order to orchestrate the
new value chain. Small horticultural farmers in peri-urban India for actors

2019 55
 who service Ninjacart, a market-linkage platform that supplies to
super-markets in metros, view their relationship with the platform
in terms of convenience and security. They value the presence
of a collection point in the village and an assured buyer for the
produce (both of which save them the cost of transportation to
the market and the subsequent efforts to off-load their goods),
even though prices are only negligibly more than market rates
and despite the tight standards of grading of produce for ‘retail-
worthy’ shape and size (Gurumurthy & Bharthur, 2019). In Bali,
platform initiatives such as Bali Spirit work to promote local
businesses, based on a sustainable tourism ethos. Targetting
socially conscious tourists, their operational principles differ from
Alternative mainstream travel platforms. The company also has a non-profit
wing that engages in community development. While platform
platforms can relationships embedded in local markets can present new choices,
potentially enable the real impacts depend on the longer term and how value accrues
to the edges of the network over time.
greater autonomy
Platform organization principles can engineer greater social and
and redistribute public value creation: Emphasizing non-profit motives centred
gains more on community development objectives, alternative platforms can
potentially enable greater autonomy for all actors and redistribute
equitably profits more equitably (See Box 3). Ridygo, a French carpooling
platform charges a 20 percent commission on rides, that partly
finances the platform, and is partly freely distributed as credit to
users unable to afford the service (Delronge et al., 2019). Similarly,
Thingery, a Canadian goods sharing platform, runs local libraries
on donated goods, providing digital inventory management and
monitoring services to facilitate the sharing of goods (Reilly &
Nieves, 2019). While Thingery is registered as a corporation, it
runs cooperatively owned libraries located in local neighborhoods
in Vancouver and is aspiring towards becoming a full cooperative
(Reilly & Nieves, 2019). The Philippines based on-demand cleaning
service platform LGCC (See Finding 1) plans to function as a
cooperative, as well as partner with local government units in
organizing individual women workers (Barrameda et al., 2019) to
have more autonomy and see more gains from the enterprise.

56 PLATFORM PLANET
Box 3. Value maximization at the edges
Ekgaon, a social enterprise platform in India, works to redistribute value in an equitable
manner across the supply chain and communitize gains from its platform model. This has a
direct bearing on the profitability and sustainability of agriculture for the farmer producer
companies at the edges of its network. All producer company shareholders in the Ekgaon
network hold equal shares in the enterprise to counter elite capture. While Ekgaon pays traders
above market rate, there is also a check on the commission for such intermediaries, which,
traditionally have been steep. Value addition is also being experimented in various ways, and
capacities of local producer companies for processing, grading, sorting, packaging etc. are
being built. Surplus yield, which Ekgaon does not purchase from producer companies is also
being rebranded and sold in the local market in the hope of cultivating the local rural consumer
segment. The overall strategy has been to pass on/decentralize value downstream in the supply
chain. Through their association with the Ekgaon platform, women farmers have been able to
exercise greater decisional autonomy with regard to managing their farms, acquiring inputs,
and taking on leadership roles in their farmer producer companies.

Another notable strategy of Ekgaon has been a cautious approach to tie-ups with bigger
e-commerce platforms that tend to push down returns and avoidance of venture capital
opportunities that could prioritize profits over local sustainability. Working within this context
of small land holdings and tight finances, the platform has experimented with product and
productivity gains commensurate with livelihoods guarantee for all network players, rather
than a market-led profitability model that will maximize gains for some.

2019 57
 Labor in the platform planet

One of the highly contested terrains of platformization is that of labor and work. Worker rights have
seen a continuous erosion through platform models of gig-work that aggrandize value for the plat-
form while evading liability and accountability towards workers. Our research points to several ways
in which platforms work to squeeze labor.

Temporal and spatial displacement

There is today, a planetary-scale platformization of labor, where workers in highly bounded
geographies compete with each other from in a global race to the bottom, while platforms can
pick and choose from a trans-geographic labor reserve with high turnover and thus exercise
disproportionate bargaining power (Graham, 2019). Workers on a platform constitute the
nodes of a vast and valuable network for the platform, but are themselves dispersed and
atomized spatially and temporally (Delronge et al., 2019). This is especially true for crowd
work platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk since work can be done from anywhere in the
world (Ganesh, 2019). For the worker on a platform, where every other worker is a competitor,
the ability for collective organization/bargaining seldom obtains given that “spatial concentra-
tion and cultural solidarity” becomes dismantled (Lansiti & Lakhani, 2017, as cited in Aneja &
Sridhar, 2019). Despite these odds, when workers do attempt to unionize, as drivers for Taxify
and Uber in South Africa have tried, they find themselves summarily dismissed from the plat-
form (Mare et al., 2019). Workers also experience “compressed temporality” on and beyond
the platform, owing to the long, extended working hours they spend on gigs and the need to
be constantly on-call (Chen et al., 2019; Aneja & Sridhar, 2019). The so-called flexible gig thus
devolves into an unending grind for the worker given that incentive systems reward those who
work longer and harder.

Wage-theft
Our research finds that in multiple instances – in China, India, South Africa – a trend of prom-
ising early returns from gig-work (ride-hailing and food delivery in this case), bolstered by
generous incentives and rewards, peter out over time. This has left workers struggling to make
decent returns (Chen et al., 2019; Aneja & Sridhar, 2019; Mare et al., 2019). All the while,
workers must continue to pay steep commissions to the platforms and bear significant out-of-
pocket costs for being able to perform their gigs including in the case of ride-hailing – gas, ve-
hicle maintenance, smart-phone and data charges. In South Africa, drivers who work for Uber
have to purchase road-worthy cars, which are no more than four years old. Given that many
of them are unable to access credit, they end up going through a finance program designed by
Uber with high repayment rates, trapping them into a vicious cycle of debt (Mare et al., 2019).
The arrangement’s injustice is notable given that this contract is a lease and not a rent-to-own,
with drivers being charged for kilometres travelled, excluding both the costs of gas and the
platform commission. Workers also find that their wages are often subsidizing steep consumer
discounts and perks (Chen et al., 2019; Aneja & Sridhar).

(Cont.)

58
58 PLATFORM PLANET
 Precarity
That precarity is the hallmark of gig-work has been widely documented. The early gains made
from capitalizing on an expanding market and limited competition that initially attracted
workers are today nowhere in sight, as labor becomes cheap, plenty and entirely exploitable,
and contracting and sub-contracting layers emerge within the ecosystem. Workers are often
left without redress in a system where they are not recognized as employees and thus are
stripped of protection against exploitative work practices and the right to collective bargain-
ing (Delronge et al., 2019; Mare et al., 2019). For instance, on-demand cleaning workers in
the Philippines cannot fall under the Batas Kasambahay, the domestic workers act, as it only
extends to long-term domestic workers. In 2018, several riders for Meituan in Beijing faced
unilateral terminations of their contracts and others were transferred into new employment
contracts with different third-party labor agencies (Chen et al., 2019). A growing global trend
of informalization of the labor market is thus exacerbated through platforms, with the desta-
bilization of traditional employer-employee relationships, which leads to an individuation of
risk, reduced job security and diminished collective agency, especially in Global South contexts
(Aneja & Sridhar, 2019).

Precariat Rising

Worker organizations and workers have come together from global to local levels, to resist the
unfair terms of the platform economy. In China, workers use social media as a way of coping with
the totalizing platform control, finding support and hacks to navigate the information asymmetry
through peer groups (Chen et al., 2019). In South Africa, heightened xenophobic clashes between lo-
cals and African migrants has led migrant Uber and Taxify drivers using WhatsApp groups to discuss
matters of concern about their work and safety and security (Mare et al., 2019).

Increasingly, across different contexts, workers are also able to organize to challenge the malprac-
tices of platform companies. In April 2018, DiDi announced a new guarantee scheme that would
provide drivers with a stable income if they met the conditionality of working at least ten hours
a day. For those drivers who did not join the scheme because of their desire to preserve a more
flexible working schedule, DiDi gradually reduced orders through the manipulation of its driver-cli-
ent matching algorithms. Even those drivers with high customer ratings found it difficult to obtain
rides if they were not part of the scheme. Anger against such unfair and arbitrary manipulation of
the terms of participation in the ride-hailing market led to over 100 drivers gathering in front of
the company office in Zhejiang to protest the scheme, forcing the company to negotiate with them
(China Labour Bulletin, 2018).

In February 2019, drivers of the food delivery platform Deliveroo went on strike in London and
other cities in UK protesting the arbitrary decrease of their wages, lack of transparency about wage
structure, algorithmic matching processes and unexplained termination of drivers without evidence
of wrongdoing. The protests came in the wake of drivers finding themselves increasingly travelling
longer distances for the same amount of money and the lack of compensation for delays encoun-
tered at a restaurant or a customer’s address (IWGB, 2019).

2019 59
59
The global 2.4 Data as an economic resource
political economy
Finding: Governance of data as an economic resource
of data defines emerges as an important and contentious issue in the
the frame within platform economy

which national Given the central place that data occupies in the platform economy,
data governance becomes a crucial question, requiring attention at
governments multiple interconnected levels—subnational, national, and global.
exercise policy a) Data governance as contingent on bargaining power:
action Data is the basis of the insight or intelligence that powers growth in
the digital paradigm. However, not all countries are equally well-placed
to reap the benefits of such data and/ or pursue intelligence-driven
pathways towards structural transformation. Canada is preparing
to secure its comparative advantage in innovation through strategic
investments that add platform layers to existing major industries
(mining, forestry and healthcare). With digitalized data pools from
these major sectors, Canada is able to move into a new economic stage
of innovation, “reinserting” itself into the platform economy (Reilly
& Nieves, 2019). Philippines, too, seeks to benefit from the digital
economy, aiming to derive 25 percent of its GDP from e-commerce
(Barrameda et al., 2019). However, given that the major e-commerce
platforms in the country are transnational corporations, this vision and
aspiration may simply mean integration into the global digital economy
as a consumption market. The transactions data of consumers in
this case will animate innovation that is exogenous to the Philippine
economy, an instrument that becomes the basis of what has been
referred to in the literature as digital colonization (Pinto, 2018).

The ability of different nations to further their data-based interests

– capturing and distributing the value created through digitization,
regulating the digital economy, and directing its development towards
socially-determined goals – is predicated on the place they occupy
in the global digital value chains. The global political economy of
data hence defines the frame within which national governments
can exercise policy action and build self-sufficiency in their data and
intelligence infrastructures.

We also find that bargaining power with respect to data sharing

60 PLATFORM PLANET
depends on economic power to a large extent. Where a province/
state in a developed country – British Columbia in Canada for example
– may yet be successful in retaining the right to data localization in
the USMCA trade agreement despite the data-sharing clause (CIGI,
2019), it may be much harder for developing countries to strike such
bargains in emerging multilateral and plurilateral trade agreements.
Platform companies are also notorious for non-compliance of data-
sharing stipulations – for instance, while Uber turns over data to public
authorities in bigger cities in the US, smaller cities do not have the
clout to enforce this (Wired, 2018).

Similarly, developing national platform models increases bargaining

power. As China has developed its own mainstream platforms, Google’s
blacklisting of Huawei from Android is speculated to have minimal
impact in China (Reuters, 2019).

For transnational platform companies, India’s huge market base

is too attractive a proposition to ignore. At close to 600 million
(Kantar IMRB, 2019), India is home to the largest internet user-base
in the world outside of China. This allows India more power at the
negotiation table with respect to regulating platforms including,
insisting on data localization (Inc 42, 2019). African nations on the
other hand, lacking a similar capacity to negotiate, have become
veritable data mines for large companies, as governments bring
on board large platforms with a view to ushering in digitally aided
development without any safeguards for the privacy rights of their
populations. As Taylor (2018) observes, this trend indicates “a digital
resource grab that may have implications as great as the original
scramble amongst the colonial powers in the late 19th century.”

b) Trade as a determinant:
Agreements such as the EU-Mercosur Association Agreement,
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific
Partnership (CPTPP), and the almost-concluded Regional African nations
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement, etc.,
contain rules that uniformly mandate free cross-border flows of data. have become
They also prohibit governments from setting standards for e-payments
veritable data
and e-authentication and having policies requiring local presence and
source code disclosure for transnational digital companies. mines for large
These rules that will govern the global digital economy cement companies

2019 61
 the preexisting power of countries from the Global North, while
eliminating the policy space for developing countries. An e-commerce
plurilateral being pushed in the WTO seeks to institutionalize these
rules worldwide, compromising developing countries’ ability to further
their data-based interests through national data governance.

The inequality in market power between countries is also reflected

in skewed certification power. For instance, Latin American countries
have to comply with the EU’s standards of data protection under
the GDPR in order for their companies to expand into the EU, or do
business with EU companies. Only two Latin American countries –
Argentina and Uruguay – are certified by the EU as having an adequate
level of data protection (Aguirre & Garcia-Rivadulla, 2019). Even
though the US does not have an adequate level of data protection,
post-GDPR, the US and EU entered into a Privacy Shield agreement
that allows some US companies to work with EU companies. Thus,
developed countries are able to maintain their regulatory power, while
developing countries need to give up theirs in order to integrate into
the digital value ecology.

c) Governance of data as a national economic resource:

The possibilities to manage data as a public resource seem to be
foreclosed with a planet-scale enclosure of the data commons
Governments (Rigi, 2014). From the Brazilian experience, we know how Netflix’s
competitive advantage in data, combined with its refusal to make
seem to pursue viewership data public, has led to television networks and production
companies in the country following suit (Valente & Luciano, 2019).
policies around This has rolled back industry practices of open data sharing between
market and state on viewership data, box office collections etc., that
data that are solely
had provided critical direction for policy development and regulation.
about spurring The ability of data to generate profit thus implies a self-propelling
cycle of enclosure; the instinct to preserve and grow the intelligence
on privately led premium.
innovation, rather Governments seem to pursue policies around data that are solely
than focussing about spurring on privately led innovation, rather than focussing
on the public/community value of data (Reilly & Nieves, 2019) or
on the public/ exploring models of data ownership that enable citizen-led control.
Also, while regulatory interventions have begun to understand, and
community value of even tackle, the inordinate power of privately-owned platforms,
data policies for enabling public and community based platform models are

62 PLATFORM PLANET
rare to come by. Articulating data as
Articulating data as a public/community resource would allow private a public/community
platforms to exist, while also ensuring greater public control over
them. Two approaches seem to emerge with regard to a community
resource could
ownership framework of data. In developed countries, community data ensure greater
is analogous with concepts of ‘de-growth’ (Assadourian, 2012) and
is argued in the context of data-based platforms being used at small public control
scale to leverage data-based efficiencies for sustainability and a move
away from over-consumption, as in the examples previously discussed
of EU and Canada (Delronge et al., 2019; Reilly & Nieves, 2019). On
the other hand, articulations of data commons and/or community-
controlled platforms in developing countries may be seen to be linked
directly to equitable growth. India’s draft National e-commerce Policy
(2019), for instance, underlines that a suitable framework for sharing
of community data with startups and firms will be necessary for the
larger public interest. These ideas are not contradictory, but reflect
visions for a greater social orientation of the digital economy, from the
respective development standpoints of countries of the Global North
and South.

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64 PLATFORM PLANET
CHAPTER 3
2019 65
 Conclusions
From ecosystems of value to ecologies of choice

To a large extent, scholarship has tended to see the phenomenon of

platforms in terms of the small ‘p’, the platform as a business model.
Scholars have done this by focussing on specific platform players
i.e. big tech companies, and platform types (Srnicek, 2017), and the
significant firm and business level shifts they encapsulate and effect.
This research has thrown the spotlight on the Platform model with a
capital ‘P’ – that is, the steady reorganization of the global economy in
the network-data context. Here, the distinction we make is akin to that
between capitalist businesses and the larger idea of Capitalism. Our
findings show that to capture the paradigm shift underway, research
frameworks need to be able to unravel the platform phenomenon,
moving between these two conceptual categories.

Proceeding from an analysis of production systems and value creation

and distribution, we argued that the transformation from size-scale
to intelligence-scale economies irrevocably changes economic
organization, as data becomes the new resource over which a
planetary struggle for power emerges. In our findings, we have traced
how, emerging from the shadows of the still-dominant US and Chinese
models, platformization has followed varied trajectories, rooted in
the specific historical development contexts of nations. Discussing
the interconnected contestations around data that emerge in the
platform economy, we have also laid out the various strategies that
platforms deploy to further their intelligence premium – pointing
to how mainstream platforms corner value for themselves. We also
identified that alternative and equitable models of value distribution
The dominant and expanded choice can and do exist.
platform model
Hyperoptimizing the ecosystem for aggrandizing value, the dominant
thrives on platform model thrives on and drives a state of ‘data dispossession’ on
a planetary scale. Analogous to the idea put forth by Harvey (2005),
and drives a “accumulation by dispossession”, that is, “the distinct socialised
dynamic of capital accumulation, whereby, society is dispossessed
state of ‘data of what are publicly held realms by way of turning them into sites
dispossession’ on a for private profit” (Wolfson & Funke, 2018), data dispossession may
be described as the colonization and commodification of everyday
planetary scale life through infrastructures of intelligence. Thus, platforms do not

66 PLATFORM PLANET
attain their enviable and omniscient data-based power in a vacuum, While individuals
but through an “asymmetric power relationship in which individuals
are dispossessed of the data they generate in their day-to-day lives” are dispossessed
(Thatcher et al., 2016.p.990).
of data that
While individuals are dispossessed of data that comprises their very comprises their
identity, society is dispossessed of its relational data – both becoming
sites of exploitation for the emerging economies of intelligence. The very identity,
intelligence premium gained by the platform owners and elite becomes
an instrument of economic and political control. Individuals and society is
communities lose their decisional autonomy as society’s structures of dispossessed of its
choice are subsumed within the logic of ‘Platformization’.
relational data
Additionally, dispossession by data signifies a new dynamic of
neoliberal capitalism – wherein digital intelligence is both the means
of economic production and also the means of social governance.
Platforms enclose consumers through “voluntary servitude”
(Emmenegger et al., 2014, as cited in Romele et al., 2017)10,1where
instant gratification is offered for unconditional exchange of data, and
to lock producers, enterprises, suppliers, service-providers and others
into a continuously hyper-optimizing value proposition that for these
actors increasingly becomes the only de facto choice. Platforms may
also brutally expunge or strategically cannibalize, managing the value
trajectory for maximizing economic power and social control.

3.1 Strategic choices framework for platform

models
Against the backdrop of a new techno-economic model all set to
engulf current production and market systems, societies need to think
urgently about foundational questions of exclusion and equity. The
political economy mapping of platformization attempted here shows
that platforms are not only infrastructures of value but also ecologies
of choice. Depending on their specific configurations, outcomes vary
with regard to who participates, who controls who can participate,
who gains, who loses, and how gains and losses are spread.

10 Voluntary servitude is a political term first coined in the 16th century by Étienne de La
Boétie, and can be applied to any context where there is a power relation between a group
of individuals on the one hand, and a political, economic or technical force on the other
hand (Emmenegger et al., 2014, as cited in Romele et al., 2017).

2019 67
As ecologies of The language of ‘opportunity’ alone may be insufficient in this context,
hiding the risks and threats of a global platform ecosystem in which
choice, platforms some actors already have disproportionate control that extends all the
way to micro-local socio-economic conditions. As ecologies of choice,
shape the platforms shape the resources, agency and achievements of member
resources, agency participants and their resultant ability to make decisions critical to
their autonomy and well-being.
and achievements
We identify three specific axes that co-determine the manner in which
of member choices accrue to actors in the platform ecosystem – ownership,
control of the data and algorithmic assemblage and value (distribution).
participants and
We further explicate possible typologies that explain different
their resultant characteristics of each of these three axes, below (See Table 7). Using
these axes, we outline A Strategic Choices Framework for Platform
ability to make Models. The framework defines possible characteristics or typologies
that offer a variety of pathways for the platform marketplace.
decisions critical to Depending on the pathway of choice, it is possible to understand how
their autonomy and outcomes can vary with regard to who participates, who controls who
can participate, who gains, who loses, and how gains and losses are
well-being spread.

Actor choices (social, economic, technological, political) in platform

ecosystems depend on how varying combinations of these
characteristics create specific platform models (See Figure 3).

Mapping illustrations from our research back on the framework, we

are able to identify many scenarios or platform pathways that depict
how platforms shape differing ecologies of choice for constituent
members (See Figure 4).

68 PLATFORM PLANET
 Table 7. Platform Ecosystems Typology
Axis Characteristics

Enterprise Private: The platform is formally owned privately. This includes publicly traded platform
Ownership companies with majority private ownership. Most dominant platforms are examples of pri-
vate platforms.
Community: The platform is privately owned by community stakeholders. These may be
geographic communities or those that arise out of shared interests and goals. For example,
platforms owned by resident associations, trade unions, farmers’ collectives, etc.
Public: The platform is publicly owned. In most societies this would mean state-owned. Pub-
lic ownership by itself does not imply democratic control of the algorithmic assemblage.
Control of Unilateral: The control of the data and algorithmic assemblage is held solely by platform
Data & proprietors, owners, and/or management. It is not open to platform participants, including
Algorithmic consumers and workers.
Assemblage Group: The control of the data and algorithmic assemblage is held by platform participants,
including consumers and/or workers, producers, or service providers. It is not open to the
wider public.
Democratic: The control of the data and algorithmic assemblage is held publicly and deci-
sions are made through either direct or delegated democracy.
Value Captured: The value distribution is limited to a small set excluding most platform participants
and the public. This usually means that the value (or net gains derived from the existence of
the platform) is captured by the proprietors, owners, and/or management.
Collective: The value distribution is spread over a definite community or group of people, but
does not necessarily promote the public interest. For example, a narcotics trade platform on
the dark web that distributes value equally among all cartels might not result in net gains for
society.
Social: The value is distributed across society, that is, the existence of the platform is a net
gain for society. Social value can result from different ownership and control structures.

Figure 3. A Strategic Choices Framework for Platform Models

Enterprise
Private Community Public
ownership

Control of data
& algorithmic Unilateral Group Democratic
assemblage

Value Captured Collective Social

2019 69
 Figure 4. Illustrative Typologies Based on A Strategic Choices Framework for Platforms

Dominant platform model Public goods platform model

Social enterprise platform model Solidarity economy platform model

Cases identified in this study

Dominant Platforms Public Goods Platforms

TripAdvisor, DiDi,Uber, MercadoLibre, Netflix, Unified Payments Interface, e-NAM, Farmerzone

Cleanzone, Konga, Prezzta

Social Enterprise Platforms Solidarity Economy Platforms

Ekgaon, UrbanShare, LCGG, Ridygo Thingery, Warmshowers

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3.2 An alternative imaginary for the platform The warp
economy and weft of
Through a number of instantiations in Chapter 2, we have been able platformization on
to discuss various platform models. The economic restructuring that
platforms have brought about seems to be at a point of no return, and a planetary scale
yet the sustainability of this current paradigm is increasingly called
into question. Over 2018, we have seen major platform companies
is represented in
including Facebook and Apple lose significant share value. More the diverse mix of
recently, Uber’s under-performance at its IPO has led it to report a
loss of $ 1billion (Colley, 2019). China’s tech industry too is witnessing models
a slow-down with production in industrial robots and microchips
going down and companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu cutting
jobs (BBC, 2019). Experts and industry actors have for some time now
pointed to the possibility of a tech bubble - artificially propped up by
large venture capital - bursting and taking down the global economy
along with it (Bloomberg, 2018).

The real impacts of such a possibility need to be considered for the

economic futures of millions of smaller actors across the globe who
are today part of the platform economy. It needs to be evaluated for
how it will undermine the resilience of communities and geographies
in the Global South. While it was not addressed within the scope of
this research, it is critical that we also not forget the ecological costs
that unfettered planetary platformization will have – whether they be
the vast swathes of land that are swallowed up in establishing server
farms, the plundering of minerals and rare earth metals for building
newer generations of smartphones and IoT devices, or the ever-
growing energy needs of platform activity.

We are, today, in urgent need of a course correction with respect to

the platformization phenomenon and the global future implicated
in its deeply pervasive influence. As discussed in this research, the
warp and weft of platformization on a planetary scale is represented
in the diverse mix of models adopted by businesses, governments
and communities. There can be no one model that is befitting of a just
and equitable future society. However, the society of the future is
inextricably linked to the political choices that will spur platformization
as the harbinger of equity or purveyor of injustice.

While we discuss these political choices in greater detail in the next

2019 71
Communitized chapter, it must be underlined here that the very idea of the ‘platform’
as we know it today, owes its origins to the sharing economy and
platform models, the rise of techno-enthusiast communities (although mainly in the
Global North) who sought to actively move away from the excesses of
whether trans- capitalism. Also, as we have seen, communitized models of ownership
geographic or local, and value distribution, whether trans-geographic or local, offer hope
for a new economics of equity.
offer hope for a
It is thus entirely possible for platforms to be designed around
new economics of different (economic) value distribution principles and indeed different
equity (socio-political) value systems, where they can allow for autonomous
self-organization, strengthening of communities, equitable social
relations, and the creation of a new social contract. Adept and agile
policy can go a long way in translating this vision into reality.

72 PLATFORM PLANET
CHAPTER 4
2019 73
74 PLATFORM PLANET
Platform governance: the way forward
Platform governance is an overarching development policy challenge
of our times, not just a narrow technology policy issue. A planet-
wide restructuring of economic ecosystems by digital platforms
has triggered new contestations over socio-structural relations and
geopolitical power. This calls for a cohesive policy response that can
adequately and appropriately reorient the platform mode of economic
organization towards a more equitable distribution of the efficiencies
of intelligence scale economies. Such a policy approach also needs to
be multi-scalar (spanning interventions at global to national and local
levels) as well as cross-sectoral (encompassing integrated actions
in digital, economic and social policy domains). We summarize the
challenges for policy development in this chapter, also discussing the
key building blocks of a comprehensive policy framework.

4.1 Governance challenges in the platform Platformization

economy demands a multi-
a) Old laws don’t work: Most countries in the Global South lack scalar and cross-
legislative frameworks that address the rights and development sectoral policy
implications of platformization trends. For example, as we found,
individuals engaged in platform-mediated service work across response
different sectors – domestic work in the Philippines, tourism in
Indonesia, and transportation in South Africa – are not covered
under pre-existing labor laws (Barrameda et al., 2019; Bentley &
Maharika, 2019; Mare et al., 2019). Similarly, the interests of small
and medium enterprises and consumers are not adequately protected
against unfair trade practices of platform companies in emerging
digital commerce markets such as Nigeria (Nuruddeen et al., 2018).
Even developed countries with legal-institutional frameworks for
human rights enforcement and corporate accountability – such as EU
member states – face difficulties in coping with the ongoing digital
disruption. In France and Belgium, robust pre-digital labor laws are
proving inadequate in providing social protection to platform workers
with atypical employment contracts. Similarly, the application of pre-
existing consumer protection frameworks to digital services in the
EU has meant the use of blanket disclaimer clauses by platform firms,
with no explanations about obligations arising in the online context
(Delronge et al., 2019). When new legislation specific to the digital

2019 75
State responses context, such as the GDPR, has been introduced, the penalties for
violation may often not be deterrent enough (Hintz & Brand, 2019).
to rights and It has been found that companies such as Google, which have been
repeatedly fined by the European Commission for non-compliance
development with prevailing legislation, nonchalantly continue their illegal market
implications of practices by treating fines as the costs of doing business.

platformization b) State responses are knee-jerk: Platform regulation often times

tends to be ‘scandal-prompted’. For example, in China, it was public
trends are often outrage over the rape and murder of two female passengers by DiDi
knee-jerk Hitch drivers in 2018 that prompted the ministry of transport to set up
a national supervision platform for systematic background verification
of the drivers enrolled with ride-hailing companies (Chen et al., 2019).
Similarly, in Uruguay, the central bank rushed in to hastily regulate
the P2P lending sector without fully understanding its operational
dynamics as a response to increasing negative national media coverage
about the sector becoming a ‘financial Uber’ (Aguirre & Garcia-
Rivadulla, 2019).

c) Platforms become boundary objects, interpreted differently by

different state agencies: The conflicting imperatives to create an
enabling environment for the growth of the domestic digital sector
whilst guarding against the monopolistic and exclusionary tendencies
of the platform economy seem to culminate in a Catch-22 scenario
impeding effective policy development. For example, in Argentina,
there was a bitter tug-of-war between the Ministry of Production
and the Argentine revenue service (AFIP) about the application of tax
laws to the regional e-commerce platform MercadoLibre. While the
Ministry of Production called for exempting the platform from tax
liability as part of its larger strategy of encouraging domestic digital
industry, the AFIP was of the opinion that MercadoLibre ought to be
treated as a commercial firm rather than as a technology company.
The Ministry of Production had its way, but it is difficult to ascertain
whether the decision to treat MercadoLibre as a technology company
deserving of tax exemptions will fare better for the long term health
of the Argentinian economy in comparison to the AFIP proposal
(Artopoulos, 2019).

d) Big platforms are mythified as the necessary route to success: The

myth-making that surrounds platforms also means that governments,
especially in the Global South, adopt pro-platform policy approaches.

76 PLATFORM PLANET
The promise of innovation and opportunity has often led governments
to valorize platforms as an enabling force in aiding national growth.
There has existed in the tech industry, even before the platform era,
an “alliance capitalism” between industries of innovation and policy
(Higgins, 2015, as cited in Chen et al., 2019). Consider the 2018
bid by Amazon for its new headquarters, which had city and state
governments in the US outdoing one another to offer sops, tax cuts,
economic incentives and even political positions to the company,
convinced by the potential for jobs and economic growth that Amazon
could bring in for the economy (City Lab, 2018b). Or, as in China’s case,
where the Internet Plus vision has catalyzed and championed the
growth of private platforms in many ways (Chen et al., 2019).

e) Platform companies tend to usurp public policy spaces:

By becoming a part of the multi-stakeholder processes that drive
policy, platforms take on a direct role in norm and rule development.
Such formal membership in governance spaces raises concerns
about conflict of interest. In Argentina, when traditional banks raised
concerns over MercadoLibre’s new offerings for fintech services,
the company successfully negotiated with the government to set
up a commission to liaison between the central bank and itself, also
managing to get a seat on the commission (Artopoulos, 2019). In
December 2018, Netflix’s director of regulation was appointed to
Brazil’s film board, Conselho Superior de Cinema, a recognition that
the platform is an increasingly important player in the country’s media
regulation discussions (Valente & Luciano, 2019).

f) The lack of binding international law gives corporations runaway

power: There is no binding global legal framework to check corporate
abuse and violation of human rights. Transnational digital companies
not only flout domestic legislation with impunity, but also exploit
the lack of cross-jurisdictional rules. When faced with the risk of
prosecution for unfair market practices in national courts, they evade
responsibility by transferring liability to their parent company outside Transnational
the jurisdiction (Mare et al., 2019; Van Eck & Nemusimbori, 2018).
For example, in 2017, the South African Transport and Allied Workers digital companies
Union brought a case to the national Commission for Conciliation,
Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) on how Uber’s arbitrary
flout domestic
deactivation and termination of drivers enrolled on the platform legislation with
constituted a violation of protections against unfair dismissal under
the country’s existing labor laws. CCMA took up proceedings against impunity

2019 77
 Uber SA, the South African subsidiary of the global platform company,
and ruled in favour of the plaintiffs. A year later, the company managed
to get the ruling overturned in the Labor Court on the technicality
that Uber SA was a mere recruitment and training agency for Uber BV
based in the Netherlands, which provided the app and made payments
to partner-drivers.

4.2. Curbing digital monopolies

The platform economy displays monopolistic tendencies that curtail
economic innovation and deepen inequality; but by no means is this an
inevitability (Mann & Iazzolino, 2019). Traditional legal approaches to
managing the rights, relations and conduct of persons and businesses
Competition engaged in commerce demand a major overhaul in the digital context
(See Figure 5). This pertains to both commercial laws and to new rules
law must be concerning techno-design.

overhauled to 4.2.1 Changes to commercial laws

check price
a) Competition law: Current approaches in competition law tend to
manipulation by regard short term consumer pricing gains as an adequate indicator
of vibrant market competition (Khan, 2019). Understandably, this
platforms signal becomes extremely misleading in emerging digital markets
where dominant platform companies often pursue strategies of
free/deep-discounted products and services with an eye on long
term consolidation of the network-data advantage for market
domination (Curbing Corporate Power Alliance, 2019). In this scenario,
competition law must move away from a narrow, neoliberal consumer
welfarist approach. Instead, it must adopt economic structuralism as
a framework to address the undue advantage that digital platforms
enjoy in their role as “unavoidable trading partners” in the multi-
sided markets they control (Cremer et al., 2019). The unique vantage
that platforms occupy enables them to engage in upstream and
downstream price manipulation, which policy must be able to check.

The opacity that surrounds such data-supported gaming by platform

companies makes it difficult to identify and establish proof of willful
anti-competitive conduct. The EU has attempted to address this
through its February 2019 regulation for platform businesses. It
has mandated a duty of transparency (to be effective by 2020) with

78 PLATFORM PLANET
regard to standard terms and conditions of service (including data
practices and notice of changes in terms of services) on all platform
intermediaries providing digital services. This covers search engines,
e-commerce marketplaces, app stores, social media and even price
comparison tools. In addition, it has provided user guarantees for a
right to explanation pertaining to algorithmic ranking and prioritization
of goods and services on platform marketplaces (European
Commission Press Release, 2019).

Preventing the establishment of platform monopolies that can erect

permanent barriers to new innovators in the platform economy is
also a related challenge for competition law in the digital age. The
introduction of Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Access
(FRAND) provisions in technology patenting is essential to prevent
digital corporations from locking in essential building blocks of Merger scrutiny
algorithmic innovation. Mandatory data sharing requirements111and
data interoperability, as highlighted by the European Competition must guard against
Commissioner, are more useful strategies to curb the market power
of data monopolies when compared to unbundling/breaking them,
the concentration
as it enables us to retain the benefits of integration opened up by of big data power
intelligence economies of scale while curbing abuse of market power
(Foo Yun Chee, 2019). Finally, in mergers and acquisitions where big
data resources are involved, the decision of competition regulators
ought to be guided by the precautionary principles of checking the
concentration of big data power. The approach of Russian and EU
regulators to Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto sets a useful precedent
in this regard, although it is by no means the last word in regulating big
data power (See Box 4).

b) Foreign investment rules: In the platform economy, industrial

era rules for trade and investment need to be revisited to protect
and promote domestic advantage. Countries like France and
Germany have tightened scrutiny of non-EU bids for companies
operating in the digital sector with the intent to safeguard their
strategic IP, data and AI assets (Ciurak, 2018). The Committee
on Foreign Investment in the United States has been vigilantly
tracking attempts by foreign investors to buy stakes in AI startups,

11 Proposals for progressive data sharing regimes where companies whose market share
reaches a defined level must compulsorily enable access to their data resources to compet-
itors in the same market, particularly start-ups, are quite useful in this regard (Mayer-Schon-
berger & Ramge, 2019).

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 Box 4. Russian and EU regulators’ responses to Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto

The acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer signals an imminent risk of concentration of agricultural

data resources in a single entity, leading to increasing dominance over the world’s seeds and
pesticides markets.

In 2017-18, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly service (FAS) reviewed this acquisition for
potential anti-competitive impacts. The deal was allowed to go through on the condition that
Russian companies engaged in the development of agriculture software and applications would
be provided access to the future data collected by the combined entity after it started the
operations of its digital services in the domestic market. A technology transfer mechanism has
also been established for ensuring that the new molecular breeding and germ plasm techniques
developed by the combined entity, including advancements in data techniques and tools, are
also accessible to Russian companies. The order of the FAS seeks to level the playing field in the
domain of precision farming for Russian companies.

Similarly, in 2018, the European Commission permitted the acquisition on the condition that
the combined entity would divest a portion of its seeds and pesticides business, including R&D
lines, and license a copy of its worldwide current offering and pipeline on digital agriculture to
BASF, 12 thus “maintaining competition by allowing BASF to replicate Bayer’s position in digital
agriculture in the European Economic Area (EEA)” (European Commission Press Release, 2018).

particularly bids from China, in order to move quickly to stop

deals that are seen as contravening national security and global
competitive advantage (Somerville, 2019).

Similarly, since 2015, the Chinese state has been attempting to crack
down on Variable Interest Entity (VIE) structures through which
Chinese technology companies have been circumventing foreign
investment restrictions in the digital sector (Shen, 2019). A VIE is a
domestic firm with 100 percent Chinese shareholding that enters into
a contractual arrangement with an offshore Special Purpose Vehicle
owned by foreign investors, in order to give them contractual control
and economic benefits without violating the existing legal proscription
on national ownership of equity stakes in companies operating in
strategic economic sectors.

12 A German chemical company that operates in more than 80 countries. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASF

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c) Corporate taxation: Evolving an effective corporate tax regime In the digital
in the platform economy is challenging for two main reasons. One,
the virtualization of commercial transactions enables powerful
economy, the
transnational corporations to easily shift profits from higher tax basis for taxation
jurisdictions to lower tax jurisdictions, thereby eroding the tax base
of the former context. And two, traditional taxation regimes do not must shift from
adequately account for the contribution of intangible data resources
extracted from a jurisdiction for revenue generation in platform physical presence
business models. This has led to calls for the basis of taxation to be to substantive
shifted from ‘national physical presence’ to a ‘substantive economic
presence’ as far as the new firms of the digital economy are concerned. economic presence
As the OECD (2019) has highlighted, the substantive economic
presence of digital-age business in a particular jurisdiction has to be
determined through criteria such as:
I. the existence of a user base and associated data input,
II. the volume of digital content derived from the jurisdiction, and
III. sustained marketing and sales promotion activities.
The government of France introduced a draft regulation for a digital
services tax in March 2019, to shift to a taxation regime based on
the logic of substantive economic presence. Developing countries
stand to gain from such changes to taxation systems for digital
services considering that they currently receive no compensation
from transnational platform companies for the data mined from their
territories.

d) Consumer protection: Liabilities of platforms need to be situated

in specific ways as platform models become mainstream. China’s
e-commerce law passed in August 2018 adopts this approach by
holding platform intermediaries liable for failing to undertake
background verification of merchants and for consumer health and
safety violations (Chen et al., 2019). In addition to updating existing
laws, new forms for digital enforcement of consumer protection rights
are also useful to explore. For example, smart disclosure systems
can enable platform users to obtain timely access to relevant pre-
contractual information and personalized advice that enables them to
effectively negotiate terms of service (Delronge et al., 2019).

e) Upgrading pre-existing sectoral legislation: Pre-existing

commercial laws pertaining to specific business sectors need to be
revamped for building a fair and inclusive platform economy (See Table
8).

2019 81
 Figure 5. Governing the Platform Economy : Digital Monopolies

82 PLATFORM PLANET
2019 83
 Table 8. Upgrading Sectoral Legislation for the Platform Economy, a Snapshot

Sector Legislative Reform

South Africa’s National Land Transport Amendment Bill (2018) opened the
door for the issue of regulatory stipulations on the design of Uber/Taxify
Transportation apps to facilitate greater transparency about driver details, costs of the ride,
and estimated time to destination in every user transaction (Mare et al.,
2019)

In 2014, the Italian Competition Authority held that online travel service
Travel and Tourism platforms such as TripAdvisor can be charged with unfair commercial
practice if they fail to verify user reviews (Biffaro, 2015)

In 2016-17, in response to emerging public outrage about fraud and

malpractice in online P2P lending, the Chinese government came out
with regulations that restricted P2P lending platforms to the information
intermediation business of matching borrowers and lenders, disallowing
them from providing direct credit services (Tech2Crunch, 2018). As
enforcement continued to be a challenge because of the mushrooming
P2P lending
number of small P2P platforms, in 2019, the government took the tough
call of deliberately shrinking the size of the P2P lending market for greater
stability by winding down medium and small scale operators with high
default risks and transforming larger operators into licensed online micro-
lenders/ financial intermediaries that help financial institutions issue loans
(Caixingglobal, 2019)

In 2014, the Philippines enacted legislation that prohibits anti-competitive

practices such as bid-rigging, predatory pricing, tying and bundling by
E-commerce dominant players, unfair exercise of monopsony power, and anti-competitive
mergers and acquisitions. These provisions can be applied to e-commerce as
well. (Barrameda et al., 2019)

In 2017, Brazil enacted a law obliging VoD platforms to pay service taxes to
municipalities in which they are operating. Further, Ancine, the government
agency regulating the film and TV sector has proposed making changes to
Media
the content recommendation algorithms of platforms such as Netflix, as part
of promoting local content to maintain media diversity (Valente & Luciano,
2019)

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4.2.2 Techno-design for platform neutrality Data and protocol
Platform neutrality, or the prevention of user lock-ins into dominant interoperability are
digital platforms, is a very important techno-design element for
curbing monopolistic tendencies in the digital economy (CNN
essential techno-
Numerique, 2014). This is possible only through mandatory technical design elements
compatibility/ interoperability design features that will enable users to
seamlessly multi-home between emergent and incumbent platforms to overcome the
in the market. Interoperable design of platforms may be understood
as pertaining to two main aspects: data interoperability and protocol
dominance of ‘first-
interoperability. Data interoperability refers to portability of personal mover’ platforms
or machine user data across platforms with the possibility of continual,
potentially real time access. Protocol interoperability is about
facilitating two digital services or products to technically interconnect
with one another (Cremer et al., 2019). The European Union has taken
a concrete step in this direction through new guidelines mandating
the development of codes of conduct for cloud services to facilitate
switching between cloud service providers by the end of November
2019 (European Commission Press Release, May 2019). In the absence
of these provisions, the room for user experimentation and switching
across different platformized services will be restricted and this will
result in a scenario where the market advantage of first mover firms is
continually reinforced (See Figure 6).

Figure 6. Governing the Platform Economy : Techno-design

2019 85
Countries in the In addition to interoperability, the following design choices are also
critical to ensure fair and non-discriminatory platform-mediated
global south need markets: prevention of bias in ranking algorithms (criteria and weights
used) and provision of transparency, accountability and privacy related
to build domestic safeguards in the design of default options, search filters, and feedback
capabilities to and recommendation systems in platform interfaces (Cremer et al.,
2019).
reap the platform
4.2.3 A global governance framework for Big Tech
economy’s
intelligence The draft legally binding instrument on transnational corporations
and other business enterprises with respect to human rights proposed
premium, putting by the UN Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on
Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises must
it to the service be adopted at the earliest. The draft underlines the extra-territorial
obligations of states for human rights violations perpetrated by
of equitable
transnational corporations headquartered in their territories. The
development treaty should have specific provisions outlining the obligations of
digital corporations, such as mandatory compliance with domestic
regulation, respect for data sovereignty of countries and communities,
algorithmic transparency and source code disclosure, to enable public
scrutiny for privacy, fairness and non-discrimination (IT for Change,
2017b).

4.3 Creating an enabling environment for inclusive

innovation
In order to move out of their current position as mere data mines
for transnational digital corporations, countries in the Global
South need to build domestic capabilities to reap the platform
economy’s intelligence premium, putting it to the service of equitable
development. This calls for concerted action on two fronts. One,
developing countries must catalyze domestic digital innovation. And
two, they must assume the responsibility of convening the transition
to the platform economy in ways that facilitate the meaningful
participation of smaller economic players without the risk of co-option
by foreign/domestic platform behemoths.

4.3.1 Catalyzing domestic digital innovation

Many developing countries have adopted strategic agendas/ roadmaps

86 PLATFORM PLANET
for digitally-enabled economic transformation. These proposed policy
frameworks can be successful only if they grasp the specific nature
of the challenge of acquiring and consolidating the data and digital
intelligence advantage that propels a country into the high value parts
of the platformized global economic order. There is a lot more work to
be done in this regard.

Oftentimes, developing countries tend to erroneously reduce

the platform economy to a stand-alone economic sector of digital
commerce instead of recognizing it for the paradigm-shifting mode
of economic organization that it is. This often leads to policy misfires
that fail to comprehend the real economy implications of expanding
platformization. For example, Nigeria and many other African
countries are simply jumping on to the global e-commerce bandwagon
without examining the implications for their domestic economies
in the larger context of Africa’s premature de-industrialization. If
this is to change, and if these countries have to unlock the inclusive
growth potential of the platform economy, they must explore their
strategic advantage, build a strong vision and create the conditions for
structural transformation in the platform economy. It was only as late
as 2017-18 that even a developed country like Canada started honing
in on niche sectors for building digital bridges. As discussed in Chapter
2, the Trudeau administration promoted the establishment of digital
technology super-clusters to drive innovation, including one focussed
on creating digital intelligence advantage in traditionally strong
sectors such as forestry and mining (Reilly & Nieves, 2019).

Further, the nuanced distinction between extractive Foreign Direct

Investment (FDI) that cannibalizes domestic innovation and supportive
FDI that enables the flourishing of domestic data and AI industry
tends to be ignored in the formulation of digital innovation and
startup promotion policies in capital-starved developing countries.
For example, in February 2019, the Philippines Senate ratified
the Innovative Startup Act that seeks to encourage data and AI
innovation, particularly in the transport, finance and healthcare
sectors, by instituting measures such as tax breaks and grants, FDI rules must be
relaxation of immigration procedures for tech workers, and promotion
of networking opportunities with potential investors, mentors and
revisited to protect
national government agencies (Zhixin Tan, 2019). One of the central strategic IP, data
objectives of this proposed legislation is to facilitate ease of doing
business for foreign investors in the tech sector (Porcalla, 2019). and AI assests

2019 87
Essential platform Therefore, the Act clearly prohibits government agencies from using
nationality of startups as a criterion to determine the award of benefits
infrastructure has a (Philippines Senate Bill Number 1532, 2019). In a context where over
70 percent of local startups are bootstrapped (Barrameda et al., 2019),
tremendous role to a distinction must be made between ‘national’ and ‘foreign’ startups
play in leapfrogging on the basis of strategic control rather than source of funds. This will
fulfill the short term objective of attracting capital flows along with
development guarding the long term interest of preventing big tech companies
and VC funders of advanced AI economies from buying out domestic
innovators.

4.3.2. Convening inclusive platformization

Inclusive platformization is about opening up meaningful opportunities

for participation in the platform economy for all actors concerned. At
the first level, this involves ensuring universal access to the physical
and digital infrastructure underpinning the platform economy:
affordable connectivity, reliable and secure digital payments systems,
banking network, and postal and logistics backbone. Secondly, and
even more importantly, it is about addressing the reality of platforms
becoming the essential infrastructure of the future – the transversal
connectors that bring different segments of economic activity
together. For example, Ant Financial functions as a digital marketplace
connecting buyers and sellers and financial institutions while also
“allowing third parties to build digital objects on it” (Shen 2019). Its
multi-functionality has resulted in the platform becoming an essential
financial infrastructure for everyday life – from “online shopping to
applying for private loans to paying public utility fees”.

Certainly, such essential platform infrastructure has a tremendous role

to play in leapfrogging development. But for geographies that are not
relevant to the circuits of private capital, these advantages open up
only if the state assumes a convening role by undertaking the public
provisioning of such infrastructure. India has made some headway in
this regard (See Box 5).

4.4 Redrafting worker rights in the gig economy

Platformization raises a whole new set of concerns about the
enforcement of the right to decent work, especially its most critical
constituent elements of access to opportunities for productive

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 Box 5. Essential platform infrastructure: the Indian approach

India has interpreted the idea of ‘essential platform infrastructure’ as the digital building blocks that
are essential for supporting domestic platform innovation. Over the past couple of years, the govern-
ment has focused on public provisioning of a range of such layers. It has supported the development
of a country-wide digital payments interface that enables cross-bank digital payments overcoming
the interoperability issues of private mobile wallets (Unified Payments Interface). It has also come
out with proposals to launch a specific blockchain infrastructure to support the development of social
applications (India Chain), and set up a cloud platform that provides accessible intelligence analytics
and knowledge assimilation services (AIRAWAT).

work with a fair income, social protection and workplace security

guarantees, and freedom to organize and participate in workplace
decision-making (ILO, 2019).

As discussed earlier, on-demand work platforms have consistently

evaded employer liability by positioning themselves as technology
companies that merely connect self-employed individuals providing
services with those demanding such services. This negates the fact
that in the gig economy, oftentimes workers have little or no access
to information that platform owners control using their algorithmic
apparatus (Kaardal & Bjornson, 2018). Such information asymmetry
and non-transparency enables the platform to retain the upper hand
in the mediation of client-worker relations (Choudary, 2018). For
instance, ride-hailing platforms may force individual drivers to keep
their ride acceptance rates high or risk being deactivated, minimizing
flexibility for drivers. Similarly, microwork platforms are known to
extensively use dataveillance mechanisms to track work progress,
details about which are not disclosed to the worker.

In a scenario of mounting worker discontent, an active policy debate The platform

has taken shape at the global and national levels on enforcement
of worker rights in the platform economy. The ILO has highlighted
economy breaks
how the traditional binary of ‘employment’ and ‘self-employment’ down the traditional
used by legal systems to determine the applicability of labor laws
completely fails to account for the new context of platform-mediated binary between
service work. To squeeze labor and maximize profits, digital platforms
position themselves as generators of flexible work opportunities
employment and
for self-employed workers without meeting associated obligations self-employment

2019 89
Worker rights in the of traditional employers. These include minimum wages, paid leave,
limitation of working hours, underwriting of costs of wait/travel time
platform economy on the job, and insurance and health benefits. Legal reform in the
new economy must therefore follow ILO’s prescriptions for terms of
must be future- work participation in on-demand work, treating platform workers as
proofed through a ‘dependent self-employed’ workers, covered by a new employment
protection framework (ILO, 2017).
renegotiated social
The Fairwork Foundation, a joint initiative of academics from the UK,
contract Germany and South Africa to promote fair working conditions in the
gig economy started an innovative experiment in March 2019. Through
an exercise of annually ranking leading on-demand work platforms
against five standards – fair work, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair
management and fair representation – the Foundation hopes to move
up the standards for fair gig work and prevent the race to the bottom
characteristic of platform work (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 2019).

Unaccountable worker dataveillance by platform companies has also

come under the scanner. For instance, the international trade union
UNIGLOBAL has come out with a set of principles for workers’ data

Figure 7. Governing the Platform Economy : Labor law

90 PLATFORM PLANET
privacy and protection, contextualizing the interpretation of sensitive
personal data, informed consent, and the right to explanation, in the
employment relationship (UNIGLOBAL, 2019). Governments must
work to ensure these rights in the employment relationship.

As far as actions at the national level are concerned, there have

been some noteworthy developments in the EU and China in recent
months. In April 2019, the European Parliament approved a new set
of rules to protect gig economy workers. The new legislation targets
workers in atypical, non-standard jobs of the gig economy by covering
all individuals who meet the threshold of working three hours per
week and 12 hours per four weeks on average. These rules provide
protections such as transparency about the terms of the employment
contract, minimum level of predictability about working hours, right
to turn down an assignment without penalization and prohibition of
exclusivity clauses (European Parliament, 2019). In February 2019, the
Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, China, announced its
plans to introduce legislative guarantees for ‘new economy’ workers,
such as those in ride-hailing and food delivery sectors. It has also
censured platform companies for failing to provide worker insurance
(Technode, 2019).

As platformization unfolds, worker rights will need a back-to-the-basics

policy imagination. Today, we are witness to emerging platform models
in sectors like agriculture that traditionally in large parts of the Global
South have been managed as family owned enterprises, providing
livelihood subsistence. In the Asia-Pacific for instance, 80 percent of the
food production in the region comes from 420 million small family farms
mainly managed by women. Laws and policies will need to provide a
future proof response to a steadily platformizing economy, one that will
allow for a renegotiated social contract empowering for workers (See
Figure 7).
The development
4.5 Building a data constitutionalism for the injustice stemming
platform economy
from the culture of
Key among the policy measures to regulate the platform economy is the
governance of data. Curbing monopolies and creating a level playing data extractivism
field whereby smaller actors can capitalize on the intelligence premium must be urgently
requires much more than actions in traditional policy domains. Given
the fact that platform behemoths have enclosed the data commons, addressed

2019 91
 the imperative is to address head on the inequitable distribution of
data resources. Economic rights in data become an important sphere
for policy development in the platform age, as the precursor to the
strategic choices for platformization based on local economic priorities
and interests.

Data governance in the platform economy currently gets reduced to

the single point agenda of setting acceptable limits for the commercial
exploitation of personal data. The policy ask is not only with respect
to protecting individuals and groups from privacy violations, but also
in addressing the development injustice stemming from rampant data
The platform extractivism. The platform economy needs a new value framework at
the global and national levels for governing data, moving beyond its
economy needs capture by the market towards generating value for society.
a new value The failure to address the governance of data as an economic
resource has enabled the private capture and enclosure of data
framework at the resources by a handful of powerful transnational companies, akin
to how in the absence of federal institutional intervention, power
global and national politics determined the de facto assertion of mining rights during the
levels for governing California Gold Rush (Purtova, 2016). Assigning ownership, use and
control rights in data is therefore essential to counter a digital Wild
data, moving West. Emerging policy proposals in this regard often tend to take one
of two approaches: either focusing on giving individuals property
beyond its capture rights in data so that they can trade the same in the data marketplace,
or arguing for a public goods approach to data through opening up
by the market
government-held data resources and mandating private companies
towards generating to pool their data resources into an open access commons. Both these
approaches misfire, albeit for slightly different reasons.
value for society
Proposals recommending the monetization of personal data are now
understood to be unsatisfactory owing to the asymmetries of power
between (individual) data subjects and (corporate) data collectors.
In fact, proponents of individual property rights in data incorrectly
view trade in data resources as the exchange of individual pieces of
information in an open market, akin to commodity exchange. However,
ownership rights in data cannot be reduced to private property. Data
is a shared, systemic resource that comprises “a complex resource
ecosystem that includes individuals and groups, in relationships
with each other and digital infrastructures [mainly platforms] and
institutions in a society, all of whom generate data and are affected by
it” (Taylor & Purtova, 2019).

92 PLATFORM PLANET
Proposals that argue for a public goods approach to data, on the
other hand, fail to account for the rivalrousness of data. In the
platform economy, dominant firms are able to reap their intelligence
premium only because they enclose their data-network. This is why
proposals for voluntary data sharing may not go very far given the low
incentive for Big Tech to share their data pool. Additionally, sharing
of governmental data sets as an open access resource (without
conditionalities) runs the risk that the bigger players will capture the
same for consolidating their market dominance (Kodali, 2019).
A rivalrous, systemic resource like data needs to be governed through
a commons framework that has a lot to offer for sustainable resource
management. In the case of data resources, sustainability should
be understood as the imperative to avoid the pervasive political
manipulation through large-scale profiling with due cognizance to
social values of fairness, due process and non-discrimination (Taylor
and Purtova, 2019). A commons framework for data governance not
only holds the potential to check the monopolistic tendencies of the
platform economy, but also enables privatized-corporatized value to
be redirected towards socialized-communitized value.

Figure 8. Governing the Platform Economy : Data Governance

2019 93
 Just as in the case of other common property resources, determining
the boundaries of access and appropriation rights is vital for the
data commons as well. This is best evolved in case-specific ways and
through a variety of institutional design choices – from mandatory data
sharing through a public fiat to data pools that are held by community
or member driven initiatives. Determining the rules for appropriation
and exclusion in the data commons of a Smart City project is a
completely different ball game from a health program, as competing
interests and value considerations that need to be balanced are very
different. It is possible that in the cases of certain data commons, the
bar for exclusion may be set very low – such as for weather data, and
A people-centered in others, it may be fairly high – as in the case of epidemiological data.
Similarly, licensing conditionalities could vary. Also, privacy norms for
framework for the a sustainable data commons will need to be institutionalized through a
governance of case/sector specific analyses of informational processing and use and
implications not only for confidentiality, but also autonomy and group
data as a common privacy.

property resource
for individuals A people-centered framework for the governance of data as a common
property resource for individuals and communities must build on
and communities democratically deliberated and legally articulated values and norms.
This may well include no-go areas that a society decides will be out of
must build on the purview of datafication as also specific techno-design choices in
relation to connectivity, software and AI, to further platform models
democratically
that decentralize value.
deliberated and
legally articulated
4.6 Future research agendas
values and norms
Weaving in case studies, legal and policy reviews, and analysis of
contestations and trends from around the world, this report has been
able to demonstrate how platformization represents a paradigm shift
impacting and reshaping the global economic order. Today, as concerns
about the unfettered march of platform capitalism coalesce on the
global stage, our study makes a timely, even if, small, contribution that
offers a nuanced big-picture view of platformization.

In the process of attempting to unpack and address the knowledge and

policy gaps in the domain, we find that the scope for future enquiry
is only widening. Going forward, a political economy analysis of

94 PLATFORM PLANET
platformization will continue to be necessary as new research agendas In a platform
emerge around cross-sectoral policy aspects concerning platforms.
Deep dives into two primary areas – the global governance of planet, policy
transnational platform companies and of data as an economic resource
– assume critical importance. Knowledge-based interventions in this
needs a steady
area are key to refurbishing international human rights law, and could ethical-normative
potentially feed into efforts underway to develop a legally binding
instrument on the right to development14 . compass. The
What this research points to is that current trends for equity and task of research
justice in the platform society are worrying. A perverse convergence therefore is as
between racial, gender, ethnic and other social antecedents and geo-
political dynamics of digital technology is deepening global divides. It is theoretical as it
also endangering the planet and our sustainable futures.
is empirical; to
Policy research therefore needs to focus on the multiple locations
surface human
of social actors, examining how the planetary scale impacts of
platformization raise new concerns for distributive, representational aspiration as if
and ecological justice. Changes to commercial law, labor and social
protection legislation, taxation policy, data ownership regimes, social the last woman
inclusion frameworks and environmental regulation become significant
as economic and social relations are irrevocably transformed by
mattered
platformization.

In a platform planet, policy needs a steady ethical-normative compass.

The task of research therefore is as theoretical as it is empirical; to
surface human aspiration as if the last woman mattered.

14 See A/HRC/RES/39/9, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/296/49/

PDF/G1829649.pdf?OpenElement

2019 95
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