 I was asked to give a general input about economic aspects of digitalization, and I thought there would be... Well, I think there is no sense in talking about digital capitalism right now without talking about the current crisis. The crisis of public health, first and foremost, but for many people right now, and definitely in the years to come, an economic crisis of dramatic proportion. It is a crisis of globalized just-in-time capitalism with supply chains disrupted, and companies, governments, and citizens suddenly realizing the fragility of global production networks and the impact of this on health and social stability, as well as the systematic relevance of social infrastructure on the one hand, and digital services such as cloud computing, video communication, and of course, online shopping on the other hand. We are dealing with a project to build a privatized, or to put it more precisely, proprietary markets. The preliminary stage of such privately owned markets are the platform companies of the commercial internet, which have in many cases established themselves as commercial monopolies for certain services such as taxi rides, Uber, music and video streaming, Spotify Netflix, or food delivery. These private markets, however, are embedded in the socio-technical ecosystems of a small number of companies, among which the most important ones are Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, at least for the global west. The other platforms circulate like satellites around these platform planets. By binding our attention, the planets, or you could call them meta-platforms as well, are more and more in control of what we perceive at all. They control a large chunk of our attention, as can be seen, for example, in ever-growing screen time during the current corona crisis. This position of power is a goldmine, because in increasingly competitive consumer markets only those who can create attention for their products are actually able to sell them. Control of users' attention actually means control of consumption time, or to put it more abstract, control user attention means control the demand side of a market. Surveillance capitalist advertising is thus one way of capitalizing on consumer attention, or on the control of demand. It is of course just one such way, which is why the privatized markets theory emphasizes a variety of mechanisms of capitalizing on the market-like function of meta-platforms. Most of these mechanisms are based on different types of fees, which the meta-platforms charge for their function as markets, including, of course, revenues from advertising, but also more direct fees for market participation, like, say, the 30% of revenue, of revenues Google's and Apple's app stores charge for transactions between, say, a German gamer and a game-developing company in the Philippines. The pointed thesis about digital capitalism then is that the leading companies of the commercial internet, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, do not really operate in markets whose pricing mechanisms they might, for example, distort. They are these markets. They are these markets in the sense that for the economic space of the commercial internet, they are the ones connecting almost all the supply, apps, other software, content of all sorts, e-commerce products, to almost all the demand, everybody having a digital device. By constantly expanding their product and service portfolios and controlling the distribution channels for the products of an ever-increasing number of external providers, these private markets are permanently expanding their offerings. On the demand side of the market, i.e. with consumers, they rely on different login strategies. On the one hand, their own systems are continuously optimized for maximum convenience in order to reduce the need to switch to another system. On the other hand, they often make it difficult for consumers to use certain services outside their own ecosystems. Login effects can be observed empirically, for example, in retention rates of around 90% for both mobile operating systems, iOS and Android. It doesn't really matter then for the power of these companies that there are two of them theoretically competing for users when 90% of the users never leave their provider. The power of market ownership materializes in four distinguishable forms of control. Information control through surveillance is only the first step, which incidentally is by no means only aimed at consumers, but also and particularly at producers. Through information control, platform companies not only want to tell us what to buy, so to speak, they also and maybe more importantly want to tell producers what to make and how to make it. Uber drivers, booksellers on Amazon, app producers all over the world are told exactly how to deliver their services by the market owners. The rules and conditions of how to behave on a privatized market are made by those same companies, the market owners, leaving little choice to producers on how to deliver their services. Why does this even work, one might ask? Well, it works because information control enables three further forms of control which are essential to privatized markets and which enforce the power of platforms over producers. So information control is the first type of control. The second one is control of access. Platforms rule over who can participate in a market. Amazon, for example, regularly blocks third-party vendors from its platform, sometimes for very good reasons like fake medical equipment, sometimes for reasons that are not so well understandable. The third one is control of prices. How much someone can charge for a product depends on the market environment which is controlled by the meta-platforms. Platform operators have, for example, the opportunity to strategically expand their own offerings in order to lower prices for consumers and thus increase sales accordingly and accordingly their revenues. Fourth, they cannot, they can to a large extent control the performance of producers operating in their market-like structure. Just as publishers how Amazon or Facebook have changed the rules of books or online publishing, or check out the talk from Rasmus Kleis Nielsen in this talk series. A little footnote on that matter. Which angle on questions of power and inequality does this process imply? Let me just stress one very basic aspect. Imagine an economy run through the organizing principle of proprietary markets like the ones we were talking about. In other words, imagine a world which is like the Internet. In such an economy, a relevant amount of revenues, educated guess, 30%, might be extracted by market-like platforms. Where are they extracted from? Well, if you take the commercial Internet, the answer in most cases is they are extracted from producers, not from consumers. Consumers get highly subsidized products as is well-known in order to keep them attached to the platforms. But producers have to play by the rules of market-owning companies which includes their fees, say again 30% of revenue. These 30% are then missing on the producer or supply side of these markets. But this is exactly where in this whole equation or this whole framework labor is located. People are not only consumers. Most of them have to work to make a living and they usually do so in producing some sort of thing or service. When 30% of their revenue is missing, this is at least as a principle, 30% missing from wages of these workers. This is how this whole thing is a source of social inequality. Footnote end. Now how might we sum up all this in an analytical way? Well, asking about the analytical meaning of the formation of proprietary markets, one is not referred to something completely new, but rather to something quite ancient in the capitalist economy. Proprietary markets correspond to the return of an idea which shaped the early capitalist pre-liberal epoch in Europe, mercantilism. Unlike in liberalism and also unlike in neoliberalism, the basis of mercantilism at the time was an understanding of world trade as a zero sum game. This was particularly evident in the importance of an active trade balance which was the central goal of the mercantilist state. From this perspective, prosperity could only be achieved by cheating other parties. Positive trade balances were regularly squeezed off the opposing parties by brute force, for example, with the help of state guaranteed and protected trade monopolies such as the British East India Company. Those were the market owners of the 17th century. Digital capitalism's leading companies are the market owners of today. This time, however, we are dealing with privatized mercantilism. The big difference between the emerging system of proprietary markets and classical mercantilism lies in the respective role of the state. It was the state which promoted traditional trade monopolies because it profited from their businesses. The proprietary markets of the commercial internet, however, on the other hand are privatized sector companies that in recent years have been criticized for various anti-state practices, tax avoidance, for example, or the promotion of fragmentation of the political public sphere. The state, in other words, could be described as the big loser of this development, especially since more and more of its infrastructure relies on services delivered by digital capitalism's leading companies. So, getting back to the start again, will the crisis to come be any different for digital capitalism than the crisis that preceded it? When sticking to questions about the state, we might be able to get the clearest picture of how it might differ, however gradually. Of course, the immediate effects of the current crisis on technology are on the business side of things, probably reproducing a situation similar to the post.com and post-2008 situation. During the first weeks of the lockdown when consumer markets collapsed, Amazon became more popular and powerful than ever. This, of course, might mean more than a possible upward bump in revenues. It might drastically change the image of Amazon, creating something like a patriotic tech image, very different to what we discussed as Techlash in recent years. Another aspect is the window of opportunity for deep-pocketed technology companies when it comes to acquisitions. When financial markets will dry up or collapse in the course of the economic crisis to come, these companies might be even more capable of buying any potentially competitive startup on the market. Again, this is not only a possibility for expanding their market function for more and more services and, of course, a huge blow to competition. It is also a hard punch for any political strategy to strengthen something like a third way through digital capitalism by publicly funding innovation or startups. How could one build European tech champions when acquiring them becomes even easier than in recent years? This power shift between the state and big technology companies is probably most obvious in the process of immediate crisis management itself. When states technically try to ramp up their data management skills in order to allocate resources, bats, ventilators, labour, etc., Palantir, AWS and others were right on the spot. When the idea of managing the pandemic through contact tracing apps gained popularity, Google and Apple rose to the occasion by delivering infrastructure which seems to be without an alternative. When fake news about the virus had to be stopped, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok provided both possibilities to regulate the spread of false information through AI and advertising opportunities, for example, for the WHO. When states invested in the development of vaccines or drugs biotech companies such as Verily, Part of Alphabet or Virbiotechnology funded by Notorious Softbank were ready to offer their services and thus entered the promising health sector. Are these only spotlights or are these signs of a particular development? If the later is true, we might be observing in real-time right now not only how the corona crisis is further strengthening the power of privatised markets, just like the dot-com boss bust and the crisis of 2008 and 2009 did. We might actually be seeing a rapid acceleration of the state's deepening structural dependency on leading digital corporations, signs not only of big tax power over the economy or digital capitalism, but indeed over the digital society and its state. Thank you.