engleski

Digital Monopoly Platforms and Public Wealth: from public innovation to monopoly (and back again?)

Reports, debates and calls for challenging monopolies of tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM) are common in business and daily press. Outrage over socially damaging practices of GAFAM is found across the public sphere. These regular signs of dissatisfaction put the political system on notice and create a sense of urgency for political action in the form of regulatory and policy responses. In this presentation, we start from a seemingly obvious research question: how come that the Western countries, despite the competitive character of their economies, have the domination of a single company for a such a socially and economically important functions such as web searching, social networking and online retailing? An answer cannot be given by looking at our present situation alone, nor can it be brushed aside with techno-determinist notions of autonomous logic of networked technologies. Instead, we observe the monopolisation processes from a historical and political economy perspective, discussing it as part of the capitalist mode of production with some unique characteristics. A historical perspective allows us to trace how dominant digital platforms are established and what the underlying dynamic between public innovation and commercial capture in that process was. Such an approach also provides us with a set of theoretical insights contributing to thinking about plausible alternatives. Specifically, what are the limits of policy and regulation driven changes to reduce the current dominance of capitalist monopoly platforms? In the process, we will enhance the visibility of inherent contradictions of contemporary capitalism obfuscated by analytical frameworks that normalise and naturalise its presence as the only possible social form of production and circulation of products.

Monopoly, platforms, wealth

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