Influencers, as platform burghers, should have a say in platform governance says professor

Author of Cloud Empires, Vili Lehdonvirta claims it is time to support the involvement of traders and craftspeople in the governing of tech platforms

Platform owners have too much power and too little accountability. We live in a digital reality imposed on us gradually in course of several decades, where internet commerce and communication platform owners dictate decisions that affect millions and millions. Time has come to fix this, says Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research professor Vili Lehdonvirta from University of Oxford. He authored Cloud Empires, where he explains cases from the history of online commerce and labour from eBay to Uber and from Mechanical Turk to Upwork.

"Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control"

Lehdonvirta says there are at least four social classes in the platform economy. The aristocrats at the top, abusing their subjects. The consumers, us, at the bottom. Laborers who keep the platforms running. And above the laborers, below the aristocrats, the new burghers of the platform economy are gaining power. Among the rising bourgeois class are the successful app developers, online merchants, and influencers. They have, Lehdonvirta claims, earned resources on digital platforms that enable them to push back against the platform aristocrats’ power.

Calling himself neo-medievalist, Lehdonvirta uses these old power structures throughout the book, driving his point that nothing new is going on in the digital realm, that humanity hasn’t dealt with before. So just like the wealth started accumulating in mediaval towns to this new bourgeois class, there is platform power now in the hands of some commercial platform users. His book offers just one example of a business owner making their case and winning against a platform: App entrepreneur Andrew Gazdecki was able to compel Apple to revisit a policy change about to be made in “The App Store Review Guidelines” in 2017 that threatened his business (the 4.2.6 policy that stipulated that Apps created from commercial template or app generation service would be rejected). Gazdecki’s company “Biznes Apps” was about to be outlawed. Thanks to his connections and resources, Gazdecki was able to get Apple’s attention and have the rule amended.

Unlike the powerty-stricken pieceworkers, members of the platform middle-class could take the time off work to do politics. They could afford to learn about an issue that affected them, discuss it with their peers, sign a petition or perhaps even blog about it or contact a local journalist or a politician, Lehdonvirta summs up in chapter 10. Collective action II: Rise of a Digital Middle Class. He further observes that members of this middle class have the confidence, education and skills to challenge the rulemakers, not forgetting the fact that they are not that afraid of platforms penalizing them for speaking up, as they have their skills and savings as safety nets to fall on.

Just like burghers in medieval towns had social status and wealth to collectively resist their lord’s power, and eventually did gain a say in the town’s governance, so too can the digital burghers. We are seeing some of that already in how Apple¹ and Google dropped the “platform tax”² of 30% to 15% for developers making less than 1 million dollars a year.³

2020 saw the forming of The Coalition for App Fairness, an independent nonprofit organization “to protect consumer choice, foster competition, and create a level playing field for all app and game developers globally.” The coalition recently voiced its support of the EU Digital Markets Act.⁴

1. Apple 18.11.2020 Apple announces App Store Small Business Program https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-store-small-business-program/

2. New York Times 27.11.2012. Apple and Google’s Tax on Developers https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/apple-and-googles-tax-on-developers/

3. See The Verge 24.8.2021: Making It Work 2021: A guide to platform fees https://www.theverge.com/21445923/platform-fees-apps-games-business-marketplace-apple-google

4. Coalition for App Fairness 5.7.2022 Statement on DMA adoption in the European Parliament https://appfairness.org/coalition-for-app-fairness-dma-adoption-statement/