Regulating Platforms as Labor Extraction Organizations

• In Event: 30254 - Professionall Legal Practices

Abstract

This article offers a new approach to the problem of platform regulation, describing platforms as organizations that specialize in the extraction of labor from their users. Countering a commonplace assumption that platforms are primarily a new technology, and not a new organizational type, Part I describes how relations of production are produced at the technological interface that exists between the platform and its “users” – in the form of a software application called an “app.” Wholly controlled by the platform owner, apps are designed and continually re-designed to more effectively extract effort from users in the absence of more recognizably “organizational” (and costly) forms of work incentives and control, such as wages and managerial oversight. Part II provides a critique of existing regulatory approaches, suggesting that privacy scholarship has already, but incompletely, taken a labor turn in its approach to platforms; that antitrust approaches [are focused on the market side of what platforms provide, not the production side, where they rely on uncompensated labor from users, and threaten welfare maximization more as monopsonists than monopolists] threaten to eliminate the very efficiencies for which people use platforms, which is that they are single markets, or clearinghouses; and that platforms’ regulation problem is not primarily one of consumer protection. Part III suggests how to regulate platforms as what they are: novel, labor-extractive organizations that have emerged within contemporary capitalism by using a specific technology – pocket-sized, networked computing – to increase production among a vast swath of people for profit. This article will be useful to legal scholars and lawmakers seeking to regulate platforms’ power and constrain their negative externalities; to social scientists who are interested in the relationship between technology, law, and social order in the platform economy; and to platforms’ so-called customers, who may be wondering, as they spend more and more time on platforms, who is really benefitting.

Author

• Hilary C. Robinson, Northeastern University