The DSA, DMA, and EMFA aim to regulate platform power over digital services and markets while establishing rules to protect media freedom, pluralism, and editorial independence, notably through efforts to address media concentration; however, they seem to overlook some of the underlying causes driving these concentration threats.
News and Research articles on Platform power
An analysis of platform lobbying and policy influence during the Digital Services Act negotiations in the EU.
Against the backdrop of ongoing public and political debates about the power and regulation of large platform conglomerates, this special issue presents critical, conceptual, and empirical studies that home in on the various modalities of platform power.
This paper demonstrates how gig platforms can become both a resource for risk management and a new source of risk, depending on the complex interaction between a platform’s labour management strategies on the one hand and the mix of support structures and dependencies in a worker’s life on the other.
The paper contributes to the further development of platform studies by looking at the early stages of development. It draws on insights from an exemplary research and innovation project that aimed to develop a "diversity-aware online social platform".
Retail trading platforms exemplify how platforms obfuscate conflicts of interest in their brokerage operations.
We investigate whether platform companies disrupt local regulations by analysing how cities respond to platform companies and the extent to which they concede to and accommodate them.
This paper is part of Transnational materialities, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by José van Dijck and Bernhard Rieder. Introduction In March 2019, the European Commission fined Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. 1.5 billion euro for antitrust violations in the online advertising market—the third fine in three years. In July 2018, European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager had levied a record fine of 4.3 billion euro on Google for breaching European competition rules by forcing cell phone manufacturers to pre-install a dozen of the firms’ apps when using Android—Google’s mobile operating system. And in 2016, the company was punished for unlawfully favouring Google …