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The Power of Platforms: the Case of News Publishers

Mon, May 28, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton Prague, Floor: LL, Congress Hall I

Abstract

Facebook, Google, Twitter and other companies like them develop digital platforms that enable interaction between at least two different kinds of actors and in the process come to host public information, organize access to it, and create new formats for using it, as well as new incentives (or disincentives) for doing so. The most successful of these platform companies exercise distinct forms of what we define as “platform power,” reshaping our media environment in the process through the competition between them and their interactions with others. In this presentation, we identify five aspects of platform power, namely (1) the power to set standards that others in turn have to abide by if they want to be part of the social and technical networks a platform enable, (2) the power to make and break connections within these networks by changing social rules (“community standards”) or technical protocols (like ranking algorithms), (3) the power of automated action at scale based on technologies that enable and shape billions of transactions every day, (4) the power of secrecy as they operate as black boxes where outsiders can only see input and output on the basis of limited and biased data and only platform companies themselves are privy to how the processes work and have access to more comprehensive data, and (5) the power to operate across domains, where data collected from one product or service in turn empower others. Based on analysis of the development of the relation between Google and news publishers—who used to dominate the flow of public information and thus provide a critical case for understanding the rise of platforms—we show how platform power is profoundly enabling, transformative, and productive, animated by how platforms empower other actors while also making them more dependent on their products and services. We argue that platform power is deeply relational and not a sovereign power that platform companies possess and can use at their pleasure, but they are forms of power nonetheless, tied to the institutional interests of platform companies themselves, and driving a structural transformation in our media environment.

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