Platform Capitalists
Source: The Hindu
Context: The Internet and its data lie in the hands of very large tech companies. ownership of data has become the currency of the future
About Platform Capitalists
Platform capitalists are those who take advantage of their first-mover privilege by rapidly expanding across the digital landscape.
- They offer themselves as a platform for the third party players for a price like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft etc.
- These companies retain and expand their control through data accumulation and extraction, the importance of data accumulation in the digital economy cannot be overstated
- With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices and related technologies, the possibility of data goes beyond that of the virtual to even physical and social
- Control of this type of data can even predict the behavioural patterns
- Platform capitalists have unbridled control over the data economy leading to exclusion and under-optimisation of the data for the Common good
- Since most of these companies are in the west, which leaves developing countries to fend for themselves, left out their own data's immense possibilities and uses
- State regulators have been trying to find a solution to better re-distribute and govern data structures
Data
Data has three layers
- Semantic layer-has Encoded information
- Syntactic layer-represents information as machine-readable datasets
- Physical layer-Infrastructure through which one extracts data
An ideal data governance structure should prevent the processors of the syntactic and physical layers from having exclusive rights over the semantic layer
A semi-commas approach to data governance seeks to balance public and private claims to data, it fundamentally recognises data as social commons where first movers do not get exclusive rights
| Data holders | Data seekers |
| Be it private, public or altruistic organisations can only have non-exclusive rights over the base of the base layer data | They have access to non-professional data and aggregate non-personal data |
| They can use and generate profit through it but are required to share data as others | Data seekers are entitled to accessibility in a semi commons approach |
