What makes platforms different

A search engine, a social network, an app store or an online marketplace is a platform: a place where other people meet, trade or talk. Platforms have unusual economics. The first feature is network effects: a service grows more valuable as more people use it. A messaging app with one user is useless; one with two billion users is almost impossible to avoid. The second is that many platforms are two-sided. A two-sided platform serves two groups and may price one low to draw the other. Search is free for users and paid for by advertisers; a marketplace may charge sellers so that buyers can browse for nothing.

Together, these features push many digital markets toward one or two winners. Once a platform leads, newcomers struggle, because users go where the other users already are and the leader gathers more data to improve its service.

The case for platforms

Platforms deliver enormous value. Search engines, maps, video and email are used by billions of people at no charge. In experiments led by the economist Erik Brynjolfsson, people were asked how much money they would need to give up such services for a year, and many named sums in the thousands of dollars. The finding is that many users value free services far above their zero price, so ordinary statistics like national income understate what the digital economy provides. Platforms also let a small craft seller reach customers around the world, or a teenage developer publish an app without a distributor. And scale has real benefits, such as better security and spam filtering.

The case for concern

The worry is the gatekeeper. When a firm runs the marketplace while also competing in it, it can rank its own products first, copy successful rivals or raise fees on businesses that have nowhere else to go. Defaults matter too. In August 2024 a federal judge ruled in a case brought by the United States that Google illegally kept its search monopoly, partly through default deals that paid phone makers and browser companies billions of dollars a year to make Google the automatic choice. In 2025 the judge declined to force a sale of the Chrome browser, but barred exclusive deals and ordered some sharing of search data with rivals.

Rules written in advance

Antitrust cases can take a decade, while digital markets change in months. The European Union's answer is the Digital Markets Act, adopted in 2022, which sets rules for gatekeepers in advance rather than after harm. Firms designated as gatekeepers, a group that includes Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, may not favor their own services in rankings, must allow rival app stores and payment options in certain cases, and must let business users reach customers directly. Supporters say clear rules work faster and give smaller firms a fair chance. Critics say it can delay new features and add compliance costs, and some companies have held back products from European users rather than redesign them.

The digital commons

Not every large part of the internet is a company. Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world, and it is written by volunteers under shared rules, hosted by a nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation. Its editors have built the kind of institutions Ostrom would recognize: clear policies, community discussion, monitors who watch for vandalism, and penalties that rise from warnings to bans. Open source software such as Linux, which runs most of the world's servers, is another commons, kept up by volunteers and by companies that find it cheaper to share than to build alone. These commons depend on corporations that use them and, at times, threaten to drain them.

Bringing the threads together

Across this course, the corporation has appeared as a remarkable tool, one that pools savings, spreads risk and organizes millions of people, and as a source of power that can outgrow the rules meant to contain it. A humanist view does not need to choose between celebration and suspicion. It asks a steady question: do these institutions serve people, treated as ends in themselves? Citizens, through laws, courts and their own choices, remain responsible for the answer.

Worked example

A small studio builds a language learning app. Most of its customers use phones whose maker runs the only app store allowed on the device, and the store takes up to 30 percent of each subscription. The store also bars the studio from telling users inside the app that subscriptions are cheaper on its website.

A defender of the platform points out that the store reviews apps for security, handles payments and gives the studio access to a billion customers it could never reach alone, at no upfront cost. A critic notes that the studio has no alternative for those customers and that the store's owner sells a rival learning app. In the United States, the game maker Epic took a similar complaint to court; in 2021 a judge found that Apple had not broken federal monopoly law but ordered it to let developers point users to other ways to pay. In Europe, the Digital Markets Act tackles the same rules by regulation. Each tool reflects a different answer to the old question of when private power becomes a public matter.