The fifth platEU reflection entitled ‘The regulation of digital monopolies and the production of public wealth’ authored by Toni Prug from the Department for Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka has been published at the website of the platEU project.
In the fifth platEU reflection the author highlights how the countries around the world are trying to regulate digital platforms because of their distortion of competition, direct and indirect impact on the media industry, and little or no contribution to public finances in the countries where they generate revenue. The important social functions performed by the dominant digital platforms still remain outside the regulatory frameworks, subordinated exclusively to the logic of profit. The author shows how by changing the theoretical paradigm of wealth production, a space could open up for regulatory policies capable of modifying the character of digital platforms by bringing them closer to the logic of public wealth, the social configuration of production we are familiar with from domains such as public health and science.
Toni Prug is teaching at The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Cultural Studies, University of Rijeka. He received his PhD in 2014 at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author (with Paško Bilić and Mislav Žitko) of The Political Economy of Digital Monopolies: Contradictions and Alternatives to Data Commodification (Bristol University Press, 2021). For ten years he was working as a software, networks and infrastructure engineer and architect.
platEU reflection no.5 is available at the following link (available only in Croatian).