Platform Planet: Development in the Intelligence Economy

Among the key global debates today, the governance of digital platforms has garnered widespread policy attention. As buoyant discourses celebrating innovation, opportunity and disruption jostle in equal measure with concerns about the rise and rise of digital monopolies, lawmakers and citizens are taking note of the escalating consequences of a no-holds barred ‘platformization’. As network-data architectures, platforms orchestrate the production and exchange of products and services by optimizing relationships among a network of actors, thereby transforming economic activity. Concerns about the platform economy extend to the adverse terms of market engagement for smaller players – workers, small producers and enterprises, developing nations – and the real world outcomes for local development. Regulatory deficits present an equally important challenge, as institutions struggle to respond to the public policy-making imperative in relation to the platform economy. IT for Change’s research project, ‘Policy Frameworks for Digital Platforms – Moving from Openness to Inclusion’ (2017 to 2019), unpacked the platformization phenomenon, focusing on the necessary institutional-legal arrangements for a future economy that furthers development justice. The project addressed two key questions: What are the social-relational architectures of the platform economy? What legal-institutional approaches can be used to future-proof the platform economy from inequality, injustice and exclusion?