 My name is Jonas Penzin. I am a researcher at the Berlin-based Institute for Ecological Economy Research and have the honor of guiding you through the session, which I think is the last session before we do the final wrap-up of the conference, and then we can move into the party part of the day. I would like to extend a very warm welcome not only to all of you here, but also to the people in the stream. I'm waving my hand here. Before we hear from our amazing guests who are down here with me, but also one person will join us up here, I'd like to briefly introduce it to what we want to be speaking about here in the next 19 minutes. So what is it? What makes it necessary to speak about post-capitalism in the information age? Let me start with a little, a couple of introductory words. Digital platforms have fundamentally reshaped our societies. Amazon has revolutionized the shopping experience, Twitter has become an essential tool of public deliberation, and allow me to make a kind of boomer joke. TikTok, I guess, TikTok has learned us many new ways of dancing. So not only since the corona pandemic, but surely encouraged by it, we witness a stunning concentration of capital, data, and there was also power in the hand of few platform corporations. And this has led a variety of scholars and public intellectuals to characterize this part, this era which we're living as a form of platform capitalism. And if we want to understand platform capitalism, we must not only look towards the Silicon Valley and the GAFA companies, Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, but we also need to look towards Shenzhen and Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. But this global domination of big tech is problematic for a variety of reasons, and I want to mention a couple of them now before we dive into the discussion. The first one is that we have to be clear what we are speaking about when we speak about big tech. The big tech platforms, they are not just simple market participants as any other. It's not that today I'm using Twitter and tomorrow I'm using something entirely different and they're just the same. No, what these platforms are is they are themselves markets, they own the infrastructures behind them, they own the market. And that allows them to single-handedly set the rules for how we, the users, interact on and through these infrastructures. And what is the result of this? The result are new dependencies towards these private corporations. And of course, there's also a stunning lack of accountability with these organizations. And a second problem that we see is that these big tech platforms more and more act and resemble monopolies. And from using the terminology from anti-trust and competition law, they stifle true innovation and they limit consumer choice. And what is the result? The result is that non-commercial alternatives, and we've spoken about a lot of them here in the past two days, OpenStreetMap or the platform cooperatives, they find it quite difficult to compete and they remain in the niche. So let me put it bluntly. This is not how we envisioned the socio-ecological transformation digital economy to unfold. And that leads us to this famous question that Lenny raised in the early 20th century. Well, what is to be done? Politicians have largely answered this question in recent years by turning towards competition law. And with the Digital Markets Act, the European Union, for example, has made a first attempt to impose obligations on the most powerful, what they call the gatekeeper platforms. And the stated aims, they want to enable fairer competition. But can competition policy really solve the issues that we see in platform capitalism? Or do we need to go further? Do we need to aim for a more radical restructuration of digital markets? This is the backdrop against which we meet here today. And together with my panelists, we want to discuss what policies do we need to break market power? How can we ensure that our digital futures are centered around the common good and not profit? And what could post-capitalism in the information age look like? I am more than lucky that I have three experts with me who can answer these questions. And I would like to introduce them one after another and then they will come to the stage. They will each give a brief input. And afterwards, we will all sit down here and talk a little bit. And then we will open the floor to also have questions from all of you. So the first person I would like to welcome to the stage is Cecilia Ricca. Cecilia is down here. Wait one second. I will say some kind words about you and then you can come up. Cecilia holds a PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and she works as a permanent lecturer in international political economy at City University of London. Her research focuses on the political economy of science and technology. Currently, she investigates the rising concentration of intangible assets which she claims is behind the emergence of what she calls intellectual monopoly capitalism. Cecilia has edited and published two stunning books on these topics. The first one is called Capitalism, Power and Innovation, Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered and the second one is called The Digital Innovation Race, Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order. And we are more than happy to have you here today. Cecilia, welcome to the stage. Okay, this works. Hi everyone. So at some point you will be able to see my slides but in the meantime, let me say you see them already that I'm very happy to be here and I'm particularly looking forward to discussing with all of you. So I will go briefly into what is just an introduction to the framework that I've been developing with other colleagues to try to understand not only big tech companies but also what is driving economic power in contemporary capitalism. So to give you just some stylized facts that I will not cover in detail, as you can briefly see on the slide, the largest companies, the companies with the highest market capitalization, are not only concentrating more and more value but also having common that they are intensive, intangible and in particular in digital assets. And this has led me together as I was saying with other colleagues to start thinking of them as intellectual monopolies. So what do we mean when we think of these companies as intellectual monopolies? The first thing is that these are not just one-time innovators and I will be like arguing a lot of things that might be in contradiction to the established notion because as Jonas was just saying, these companies are usually accused of stifling innovation and what I claim is that actually they are appropriating innovation, which is different. They do innovate but they do not do it alone and they are constantly turning more knowledge and data into intangible assets. But that knowledge and data that they turn into intangible assets is not mostly not mainly developed by these companies themselves but actually by a whole set of other organizations, universities, public research organizations and also startup companies, they participate in the process of producing knowledge. They participate in innovation as a process, so in the innovation process, but they do not harvest the profit, the economic profit associated with the innovation process. Of course I know you cannot see this in detail but it's just a way in which in my research and I can share with you the PDFs of my books if you are interested in them or my publications, basically what I try to do is to map the co-authorships of these companies, so these companies, big tech among them but also big pharma companies and other leading corporations publish papers just like us when we are doing research and when they sign their affiliations they are also co-authoring these papers with many other organizations and this is a way to show, to prove that this knowledge is being developed with many other organizations and when you compare this with patents for instance where these companies are almost exclusively owning the patents so they do not share the own the co-ownership is quite clear that there is a productivity practice but when I think of these companies I'm not only thinking of these companies in terms of patent monopolies because there is a lot of knowledge that is kept secret and think for instance of big data but also think of the algorithms, the search engine algorithm from Google or Amazon so this goes way beyond concentrating intellectual property rights and another thing is that they have managed to turn the privilege of the innovator from a temporary into a permanent advantage because they are constantly turning new intangible assets, new knowledge into intangible assets which means that they are active renters they cannot just sit and rely on their intellectual rents they need to be constantly turning more knowledge into intangible assets and you can already think of big tech and why they are so special but I will cover that in a second before that let me say this is not the same as claiming that these companies are market monopolies it's different what they have is exclusive access to portions of knowledge of course this contributes to concentrating more market power but not automatically leads to have one company in one market and this makes things more complicated because regulations are usually focused on markets and miss the production sphere and miss the innovation sphere and the power relations that take place in that process if you want to understand the emergence of all this and actually I will not have time to develop this but just for you to have a quick snapshot why now why do we see all these companies now emerging and I'm not only speaking of big tech I mentioned big pharma you can think here in Europe of Siemens you can think of automobile industry companies like Toyota or Volkswagen you can think of Coca-Cola and Sle all these companies actually have been favored by all these things first how knowledge is produced and we produce knowledge on the basis of existing knowledge and those that are at the knowledge frontier are better prepared to absorb new knowledge and turn that knowledge into innovations in their production process so those that are already leading will have higher chances to be always leading in the future but that this could have happened at any point in time and this is why it's also important to consider all the other things among them a very important part is there are the institutional and political transformations but as I was saying I don't have the time to develop this but if you're interested I can unfold each of these bullet points in the Q&A but just to say that this is a process a historical one that on the one hand relies on the specificities on how we produce knowledge but at the same time also depends on the role of the states also relies on certain technological developments that have contributed to concentrate knowledge in fewer hands and when we think of big tech so now I'm switching to focus specifically on big tech when we think of big tech companies what is the knowledge that they are appropriating and turning into intangible assets so we can look at the content of these company scientific publications by doing text mining of and see what are the most often key keywords or multi terms that appear in the text of their publications and what you can see in green are terms that refer directly to a specific technique within AI which is machine learning and within it to deep learning or deep neural networks and you can also see in blue a lot of keywords referring to data and the yellow ones are the functional applications of artificial intelligence and why this is important because this leads us directly to why are digital platforms so central to this stage of capitalism and this in part is explained but by the way the technology works big data is processed with this machine learning algorithms deep learning neural network algorithms that get better the more they are used which means that they are like means of production that instead of depreciating their value when we use them they get better and better so the more data these companies harvest from all of us the better their algorithms get the better predictions the better the digital intelligence they get so it's a constant process of innovation that accelerates way more than what happens for instance with big pharma or with the automobile industry leaders or with Nestlé or Coca Cola who concentrate other types of intangible assets and this is also why these companies as data driven intellectual monopoly so companies that part of what they concentrate is data but also the algorithms that process this data why these companies are even capable of performing a form of planning that is kind of different from what we were used to and this is Jack Ma so he's the CEO founder of Alibaba precisely claiming that with all this data they can plan economies completely not just and in a more accurate way than it has never been seen and actually they are using it to plan greater portion portions of the world because these companies are expanding and perpetuating their data driven intellectual monopolies by two means one is that they are entering new industries and big of course because of the focus of this conference I highlighted energy systems because Amazon for instance is concentrating a lot of intangible assets associated with having the skills and the capacity to capture energy systems related data and analyze that data and providing services through its cloud but not only to actually concentrate all the energy systems and make them the most efficient so for companies that are producing renewable energies it's kind of efficient and good and cost saving to operate through amazon web services but at the same time it's perpetuating and reinforcing these companies intellectual monopolies so it's a quite complicated scenario and this is related also to the way the cloud works all the companies that operate through the cloud and use software as a service in particular artificial intelligence as a service get access to a black box they cannot see the technology the users of the technology cannot learn from using this process of learning by doing learning by interactive these other ways of learning that are not just science based but picking up what's already been developed and try to do this sort of reverse engineering to understand what's going on that is completely curtailed because the only thing that you can do is use the services but not really access the technology and this is the concentration of this market where only three companies amazon microsoft and google has around have around 65 percent of the market and the fourth one is alibaba mostly operating in china but all this is not just in contradiction with states power these companies become more and more powerful but this surprisingly as it may seem is not only a process of struggling against states but also a co-evolution between corporate and political powers in particular with the us and the chinese estate big tech cannot exist without the policies that were put in place by their own states without appropriating in particular knowledge from the us and china respectively but also at the same time the us and the chinese estate are the most powerful states in the world among others because they have these companies as their ambassadors nowadays and they rely on them for their everyday activities going from the transformation or modernization of the statistics agencies to operate their clouds but at the same time these companies are policy makers and they work as policy makers in two different realms one they directly advise their own states on what to do for instance ceo's and and high management of big tech companies from the us provide suggestions to the us secretary of defense on how to invest and what to invest on when it when in relation to ai and the advice is invest more and more and more because china is the threat and we are the savers because we're defending the us in front of chinese threat but at the same time they plan they have like kind of shook the position of policy realms because these companies and you have here mark saco work saying it these companies are constantly defining rules standards what can be done and what cannot be done in their digital digital republics so overall we should ask are we still governed by rules or by algorithms and how is this being shaped so what is to be done very briefly this is very complicated because it's clear that the typical policies don't work in this scenario just investing more in science and technology at the same time the more public research we produce the more we are feeding these intellectual monopolies if we try also to break markets and to use the typical antitrust policies this will not work either for many reasons among other because these companies operate what we can call the natural monopolies from from the economic theory point of view think of the efficiencies you get if you only have one search engine instead of having 10 search engines not only your individual efficiency because you will lose less time but also because the algorithm gets better if it channels all the searches instead of only one tenth or or so of the searches so we could argue that we need a new common knowledge regime and I'm totally convinced of that and to that we need everyone to be capable of using and mobilizing that knowledge so we also need public free education for all and a whole set of other transformations at the global level but that's quite far from happening and although we can have it as a long-term goal we still need to think of short-term solutions and this is why I mentioned some feasible things over there but just really to conclude another thing that we need to discuss and and foster and push is for different forms of taxing these companies need to pay more taxes if they're not dismantled if they're not really challenged at least we need to claim back part of what they're appropriating and of course as a long-term way of solution or thinking of how to tackle the contemporary challenges if these companies which are the most powerful in the world are planning spheres of production are planning beyond their legally owned capital and are capable of organizing production processes using not only markets but actually planning quite a lot of of innovation production and so on why not us thinking again in terms of planning but planning really for the people and for tackling the most pressing issues in the world so with this thank you a lot and I'm looking forward to discussing with you shall I go now thank you so much Cecilia this was a lot of material that we can work with in the discussion I'm looking forward to diving deeper into some of the things that you have mentioned the second person I want to introduce now can sadly not be here with us in person today but we have him hopefully online I'm looking towards the team up there I will introduce him now he will be he will be there perfect okay the next question is max max bunk he's joining us online from cologne and max is a campaigner at the lobby control initiative which aims to educate the public about lobbying and power structures in germany and the european union and just like lobby control max himself is committed to the notions of transparency democratic control and aims at creating clear barriers to influence politics and the public over the past years max has addressed these issues both as a as a researcher and he has a phd from the university of cologne and economics and also as an activist for attack germany today in his position at lobby control max's primary focus is on the increasing power of big tech and how these corporations try to lobby at the european level so it's absolutely great to have you max and there you are behind me i'll give you the floor and we look forward to hearing from you thanks very much for the introduction I hope everybody can hear me now is that the sound okay can someone say yes no resonance from from the from the audience can you hear me well I might as well start so thanks for enabling me to join from from cologne my family got covid so I was not able to join in person I would start with a disclaimer saying that I am only an expert on lobbying in the u which is sort of interesting to to the topic we're discussing today but I just want to highlight that I don't know much about what's going on in terms of lobbying in the US for instance which might be interesting actually to know when we discussed big tech but I want to say basically six points on the lobby power of big tech that I experienced in the last couple of years in my research and campaign first part big tech lobby power is immense the digital industry in Europe spends more than 97 billion euros a year and and big tech so let's say the largest tech companies the 10 largest tech companies are response was responsible for for third of this lobby spending more than 140 lobbyists for lobby on behalf on the top 10 digital platforms in the EU spending more than 30 millions this has been enormously increasing by two-thirds in the last decade so this also shows that big tech reacts to increasing regulation they are by far the biggest lobby spender in the EU outspending the top 10 car industry car makers outspending the top 10 chemical chemical companies outspending even the financial industry point one so point two big tech is also faced with a lot of challenges it's relatively new it's not EU based and it has had a lot of scandals what does that mean for companies coming primarily at least the really big ones from the US and China they have no close ties to member states governments like for instance the German car industry has so they need to spend more they need to do more on public relations it's also important for them yeah it's important for them to take care of their image right so the data scandals they have worsened meters image in the last couple of years amazon has been criticized for working conditions in its logistic centers so very important for big tech lobbying is is their image campaigns meter for instance has spent six million euros on on image campaigns in 2020 alone in Germany what they also do is big tech companies collaborate with think tanks to polish up the image towards policy makers in particular in brosset so in the brosset's bubbles think tanks play a big role but their their relations to big tech are especially important nowadays sometimes they are very transparent sometimes they're quite intransparent all in all that's quite a problematic field because they in a way think tanks polish up the image of big tech and that's interesting with respect to what Cecilia was saying big tech tries to create the image that they are super innovative and that's why they they fund fake asme alliances in brosset's two of them i mentioned as a me connect and allied for startups which have been very much involved in the policy discussions around the digital services and the digital markets act big point three big tech what does big tech really want they are in their lobbying their main stance is to be anti-regulatory there are of course differences between the big five google amazon facebook apple microsoft alibaba and and worldwide whoever but generally their aim is anti-regulatory they they grew up in in in an anti-regulatory environment in in digitalization was not very much regulated in in the beginning now it's increasingly being regulated and they're trying to counteract that with powerful narratives by the way one is of course the the the warning of china that chinese companies might take over and do all the innovation and that's that's one narrative the other one is and we are irreplaceable when it comes to solving problems we provide the services when we want to overcome the covid crisis for instance so these narratives are very powerful but and you have to disclose them part four policy makers in the u are willing to regulate generally uh we have the impression that citizens in the u don't feel comfortable with the power of big tech this includes policy makers across the political spectrums including the conservatives and they are sharp the repertoire for the digital markets act for instance is a german conservative and we think it's fair to say that he's been quite ambitious with the parliament's position regulating regulating digital markets so there's a sort of skepticism towards big tech among many politicians sometimes only due to the fact that most of the digital platforms don't come from the u but from silicon valley in china at the same time politicians from member states or even member state governments in the u that host big tech companies such as ireland midland apple always try to weaken new regulations for big tech we saw that a lot during the digital market acts discussions but luckily ireland is not such a powerful member state so there's a certain will to regulate point five big tech needs allies when it wants to be successful in influence influencing u policy making let me compare the digital markets act and the digital services act i think it's fair to say that the dna digital markets act has uh is has been quite successful in in creating new rules for gatekeepers for big tech they have to they really have to open up in parts we can go into more details about that the dm rate really is in our view a success if it is properly enforced and that's a key question at the same time the digital services act is a good example where where big tech had its say and this was especially due because they could work together with uh the publishers lobby so springer and google worked together on this and made sure that targeted advertising which is at the heart of the digital services act is at at the heart of uh some of the business models of big tech is not prohibited entirely and only weekly regulated via the digital services act so i would say big tech needs eulize to be successful in its lobby aspirations six last point there is a window of opportunity to regulate digitalization to regulate big tech and to really challenge the power of big tech by means of structural remedies what is clear from our from our perspective as a lobby watchdog organization is that big tech is simply too powerful has too much lobby power it has too much market power and lobby power and market power are two sides of the same coin there's a lot of research showing that market concentration and lobby power go hand in hand we have research for the us on that and we will see more research on the user that is why we argue only if we challenge this dimension of accumulated private power and I say private power which is not democratically controlled we will reduce big tech's threat to democracy of course we need better political institutions with stronger lobby regulation especially tackling a one-sided lobby but we also need to go and challenge the accumulation of power we would argue that we need the break up of big tech and that this is a necessary step to ensure democratic control we we we think we have an openness by policymakers across the political spectrum to discuss the power of big tech we have opened a debate about power concentration in the economy we want to go beyond because this is not only a problem of big tech classically well but it goes beyond that we have big pharma we have the automobile industry but our idea is that discussing power concentration in the economy and as a result in our society is key to finally contribute to a democratic digitalization and potentially actually to post post capitalist digital society thanks very much thank you so much thank you so much max we will see you again in 10 15 minutes for the for the panel discussion looking forward to diving deeper into these questions now last but most definitely not least we have our third panelist here who I would like to introduce and the third person here is Eila Eila Kahl is a digital strategist and managing director of Supermarkt Berlin which is a platform for digital culture and alternative economy in Berlin since 2019 she also serves on the board of platform cooperatives which is a cooperatively structured organization a cooperative that supports decentralized cooperatively structured companies with a digital business model just this year in 2022 Eila has also started that game changer project which deals with the change framework conditions of cultural institution in a network world at the center of Eila's work is the effort to promote a cooperative digital economy as an alternative to the monopolies of platform capitalism so thank you so much for joining us Eila the floor is yours yeah thank you so much Jonas and Cecilia and also Max who spoke before me so where we just heard from max about big tech I will certainly argue from a position of small tech right or low tech because the work I'm doing is mostly grouped around the field of platform cooperativism as Jonas just said that means I'm really interested in getting a better understanding of what is needed to help growing real alternatives because what we just heard is quite depressing news and I believe every word of it is true but at the same time I also think looking at the current stage of capitalism capitalism itself is not just a an economic phenomena but is also a mindset and it is also an indicator for a certain crisis of imagination we find ourselves in because I mean looking at the reality looking at the figures we just heard from Cecilia and from Max who of you would argue okay let's just gain our powers and you know let's just let's try to do something against it I strongly believe it is possible to create alternatives but it's not possible to do this in a standalone manner meaning yeah within the certain entrepreneurial framework where an organization tries by itself to conquer any of these monopolies this is of course it's not realistic and I think we we we will all agree on that so what I would like to propose is a set of things that after years of working with alternative economies with working especially with platform co-ops which are basically also here in Berlin which we have plenty of them and I just want to share that with you so I think first of all it's really about the this crisis of imagination that we have to consider the way we tell the stories about the current state of the economy not only among ourselves but also to our children to the people we meet because this is certainly about learning to envision that another world is possible if we give up on that we can switch off the light and go home right away so from the perspective of these alternatives and let's call them platform co-ops but of course it can also be purpose organizations it could be other forms of organizing maybe potentially even those what is needed so I think what's super important to understand if we look at platform cooperatives such as fair bnb for instance that set off their work as an alternative to air bnb or if we look at alternative drivers collectives if we look at platform co-ops such as resonate streaming music collective which basically does what you all know from apple music but in the form of a cooperative with both musicians and fans on board co-owning the organization what they need is infrastructural help because obviously they don't have any means to conquer the domination of those monopolies we just heard of so what what we basically need and I think this is super important we need structural support and we need to create a new understanding of stakeholders in the economy because we have all this traditional set in mind from the yeah the entrepreneurs then there's the market there's the retailers etc etc but what if we would follow what Eleanor Ostrom has provided us with like really a great framework of how to build commons oriented economies and for her bringing the right stakeholders together is an essential tool so I don't know how many of you know Silke Helfrich who has worked on an amazing set of literature and also frameworks on commons based economies in her in her book Free Fair and Alive and also after having published that book she has created models of public commons partnerships meaning that if we want to have these alternative economies to succeed we have to bring policy makers municipalities into the game and not just relying on the entrepreneurial power of these organizations because they can't compete and we already talked about that so by establishing these new partnerships we also have to look at the fact and this was discussed in the last two days very often and people say okay but still it's a competitive market so how would cooperatives find a way to work together looking at the cooperative alliances charter intercooperation and cooperatives working together is an integral part of the value that are given there so what about coming up with frameworks where intercooperation is rewarded and is incentivized so that those organizations really work with each other and work together instead of taking the services of one of these monopolies and that would of course that would encourage little infrastructures to be built up and this is something that we certainly miss at this point because most of these of these small organizations fail the power to really intercooperate because they are so busy with just staying alive and that's also what leads to those silos we also need new organizational frameworks no matter if it's cooperatives but we also need frameworks for these organizations working together transnationally with all sorts of currencies with stakeholders that can participate globally and we don't have that because a lot of the legal frameworks especially here in Germany is really in need of reform and that doesn't only go for cooperatives but it also goes for other forms of organizations which would allow various stakeholders to be included and value transfer basically on a global level and there's still a lot of work to be done here and with that I also want to stress that there's another aspect we still we have to look into and that's the whole governance aspect because if we talk about platform co-ops for instance we talk about democratic control and collective decision making and at the heart of that is governance is the protocol of taking decisions together of yeah finding ways to steering an organization in a decentralized manner and this is also something where we need to encourage research and wisdom to be spread around because this is not a given and we all have not learned it in school or university um yeah I guess what I what I said about the diverse group of stakeholders we could see it when you especially mentioned it that a lot of the representatives of big tech are consulting their own administrations and this is due to the fact that we do not have any binding global rules for how stakeholder groups are being put together I guess this is something that is going to be vital in order to really make sure that we do not just make policies for one single group um we need to support the union unionization of big corporations such as amazon which is another really interesting development we've seen over the past years that all of a sudden these organizations are being challenged from within uh so this is another thing we need to look at and put our support out because I can believe a lot of transformation power also comes from that and finally what I can say is the time for action is right now uh policies take a lot of time and very often there's a lot of talking and meeting behind the scenes but if we look at where we currently at it's really uh I think the call is coming up for actions networking right now so that's it from my side thanks maybe maybe one in the second or the third and then we can have Max on the screen and Cecilia yeah exactly great do you want a bottle of water yes okay okay now we have a um very easy task at hand I think um we want to collectively figure out how we can move beyond capitalism so um I guess 20 minutes might be enough for that and then we have all the solutions um maybe just to start off Max can you see and hear us perfect you're ready for the task at hand great okay so when I when I heard these presentations um you on one of one of your sites you see that you had um in the bottom right part uh the question of like what are feasible feasible things that we can do right now and you didn't expand on it but I think maybe maybe we could start with that you know because um maybe we could imagine if we would go out of this room tomorrow today and we we would be powerful individuals and we could make big choices what would be the number one the very first choice that we would need to take in order to move us beyond capitalism in the information age so we're kind of just like in very brief what would be the number one thing that you would undertake in order to get us there and maybe we start with you Max because the online is always most difficult to integrate so so let's kick it off with you what would be the number one thing you would do tomorrow you're still you're still on mute or we have muted you either way we cannot hear you so I'm looking towards the technical people they're shaking there but that's no problem we can we can start with someone else um Cecilia maybe we start with you then the number one thing what would you do tomorrow so I guess the question should be split between what can be done and what I would do what I would do I would expropriate big tech I would not break them up I would expropriate big tech I will say it again and use all the digital infrastructure they have and all the knowledge and all the data to put it at the service of alternatives that are decentralized so I totally agree with what you were saying that needs to be if I understood you correctly a combination of things so the cloud still needs to be centralized because of a lot of technical efficiencies because of savings that will happen but at the same time we can have a lot of local platforms local solutions tackling specific issues so I think it needs to be a combination between global solutions new institutions when I say public is not one state I think of a global institution and then local solutions this could be a dream coming true that we will not see so if we go to the feasible thing I think that a very interesting example although it doesn't come from from the tech sector but it's still illustrative is the flu network so how researchers not for COVID but for the pre-existing flu organize and share the knowledge on how the virus changes because the virus as every virus it mutates and they share the knowledge on how it's changing from different parts of the world and collaboratively develop the new the the variations of the vaccines that then will be administered or delivered around the world so the one thing that I would do directly and this is just because of where I am I work as an academic so I would promote more specific networks that operate on a common knowledge basis great let's move on with you Illa maybe post-capitalism how do we get there yeah if if I if I had the chance I would I would federate big tech I mean expropriation I also think is super interesting and the first step could be proper taxation as you also propose so I think that would go along with my model of federation and with federation I mean breaking up big tech in smaller regional proportions and making sure that those regional bodies will be administered and steered by local committees of a really broad and diverse set of stakeholders that are connected to municipalities and to public infrastructure because we have not enough talked about the fact that a lot what big tech is producing or gets as a by result of their of their production is of course data and but it's also the impact on our public infrastructure looking at the effect of Airbnb on gentrification in cities or looking at the impact of of transport jams traffic jams generated by transport of Amazon etc so I think a lot of what we see here is touching down on public infrastructure so ideally we would have in those federated regional chapters of big tech we would have experts who would look at all those side effects and try to address that and ideally not by even more complicated policies but by local firms and companies that can help with for instance the last mile of transporting boxes from A to B that could be done by a platform co-op that is based in a specific region or city so in order to really connect the regional economy to the work of big tech that would be something that I would in fact love to work on perfect thank you so much so we have we had expropriation we had federation and now we're looking again to you max where do you stand on this issue first of all let me say my vision for tomorrow would be a lively democracy where many voices have a say right and in that way I would say stands monopoly power monopoly power of big tech but also of other corporations and getting a step further with a democratic digitalization means breaking up this power and I think this it's feasible actually I wouldn't say that taxation is very feasible stronger taxation of big tech is not that feasible in Europe at the moment especially with the current German government but also with potential future governments I don't see a lot happening on global taxation of big tech that's why I would argue a renewal of competition policy and breaking up big tech is what I would do next and I think really the atmosphere in European society is in a way also among policymakers that we can make steps forward in breaking up these companies and of course that's not the end of the story right but it's a first important step because I think that this power concentration in our economy and society is not sustainable and not yeah not in line with a democratic society okay great thanks so much for that so I feel there's there's one interesting small tension in here which I would like to like to tease out a little bit more and I think that is really the question of well what role can competition law play can it play a role and how powerful is that as a tool and I think we have we had two quite different perspectives on that so Max you just you just presented your vision for tomorrow it would involve breaking up and and Cecilia we've we've heard from you that that you are more skeptical about the the potentials of breaking up maybe we can we can tease it out a little bit why are you more skeptical than Max about about this idea of breaking up tech so the first and easiest way to put it would just be it will not happen because because it will not happen the US and the Chinese state will never go for that alternative but let's say they do what will happen afterwards on the one side pretty much was already happening Alibaba is not one company Alibaba is many companies and this although it's not that simple to see because with Alibaba we see this Alibaba and group Ali Health is the same for every multinational corporation in the world they are actually a tree of multiple companies so what we actually have is companies that are kind of an analytic fiction the multinational corporation doesn't exist from the legal perspective and they still share they still exchange knowledge between the different legal entities not only between different legal entities the among the top 10 most frequent co-authors of Microsoft you have Google and Amazon of Amazon you have Microsoft of Google you have Microsoft and Amazon so these companies are also sharing portions of knowledge between them although they still establish technological competition so if the basis of their power is the data and the knowledge they are constantly appropriating and they're still sharing it among themselves and they can still do it if we break them up even if we break them up they will still be as powerful as they are now on top of that if we try to just promote more competition we will always have this problem I do believe that we can provide or have cooperatives that operate as platforms for specific things but I'm sorry to say that there will never be a cooperative that will be in charge of the cloud and every single digital company and every company and every state and every university will rely on the cloud and the best cloud that exists is big tech cloud that doesn't mean that they did it it just means that they appropriated knowledge and data to do it and they keep doing it and it's basically because of how the algorithms work more data they process the better they get so if we break them up we will also be losing efficiencies so that's why for me the solution is to reappropriate because it was already taken from society at large so it's the only real real solution the the one that underlies everything is to get all that back we all saw yeah I very much think that you can say something that we all saw you vehemently disagreeing which is nice that's how it should be so there were two points that were raised the one is will it happen and what would it look like if it happened so I saw you disagreeing with the first one but maybe take both of them like why why why why why will it happen max just just to ask before illa did you want to raise something on it I can answer I can go step in later yeah no no but go ahead it's fine no problem okay so theoretically it's possible to break up amazon as a corporation theoretically that's entirely possible right so even the bundeskateland could do that the german competition authority dg competition on the illa we could do that in theory you could tighten competition law and enable the competition authority to do this more effectively and to have more reason to do so and I think there are many reasons um but coming back to the cloud as you were mentioning this Cecilia why not break up amazon if you separate amazon web services the retail division the marketplace and the logistic units from each from one another we are already a step further because it means that these companies cannot can no longer put the profits between share the profits between them and destroy other businesses and that would also already be a big step forward so fair enough to keep the cloud as one company and maybe it's the most efficient one and you need to socialize it or expropriate it expropriate it but to separate this this amazon company would be a big step forward i have a response from you afterwards but first i would like to take in illa because Cecilia also mentioned specifically the idea of building alternatives and the potentiality of organizing the cloud in a cooperative fashion and you were skeptical about that how do you feel about that with your experience in the in the field of alternatives platforms can they can they can they own the cloud can they build the cloud or if not what are they strong at what are their biggest strength yeah of course i mean if we discuss now building a real alternative to amazon cloud services i would completely agree i can't see any platform co-op any company out there that could out compete what they have built up but we're discussing here on a super high level and i would i would opt for a little bit more nuances in this whole discussion because it is not just the cloud raining absolutely on each and everything but let's look into other pockets of economy and there i think yes it is possible to come up with alternative infrastructures and i guess it's a little bit i would also argue for a change of perspective because i it's true we are going to lose efficiency right but efficiency is not the only viewpoint we should apply in this discussion because looking at the current state of things where we are at globally you know like look at all those multiple crises i think there's a from our position here in the west we might argue for efficiency but there is also many other positions we can take into consideration and should take into consideration because the for instance there might be groups on a global scale that absolutely have to rely on security networks outside of amazon that are in desperate need of building their own cloud services which might work and operate on a regional level and they have really good reasons to do so because they live in political system that do not allow them to to rely on systems like amazon so i think the difficulty here the complexity is that we have to address so many different questions all at once we have to look at the global perspective and then we have to look into the regions into various markets and what i would really strongly prefer is looking at the perspective of people's needs and i think this is a factor we should not take out of the debate because it's true that in many aspects it seems as if we are as if we are doomed right but but maybe it's still possible to create networks on a regional basis or let's say on a european basis that cater for economic circles where people really can get in transaction with each other and a lot of the stuff for instance retail delivery etc that many people choose to to get from amazon can be catered for by other means i think there is still flexibility there is still a possibility to not use the services wherever we can i'm not saying that it's possible to entirely neglect them because it's i think it's it's true that for a lot of the stuff we need on a daily basis we have amazon in between even though we don't even know about it we think we buy the books from our local dealer and they order at amazon right so we know about all these complexities um but to me i would really argue to i would like to break down the debates and uh and look into specific potentialities of where those um yeah corporations this if it's platform co-ops whatever can really make sense perfect let's do that let's let's break it down and try to put it into smaller pieces maybe uh i mean we will do that but at the same time we try to move beyond capitalism so we juggle both things uh at the same time but maybe if we want to focus as you said on people's needs and trying to understand what do people need and and we try to take this perspective then from the capitalist point of view we would also need to ask ourselves well who then is the is the revolutionary subject that will initiate that transition what are the needs of this revolutionary subject that could potentially move us beyond what you consider to be intellectual monopoly capitalism so maybe maybe cc maybe you can you can give us a little bit of an understanding i mean traditionally we would always say well it's it's capital and it's labor and that's the antagonism that is structuring capitalism is that changing intellectual monopoly capitalism and who is the subject that needs to push for this transformation okay so the first part i will emphasize also because i work with colleagues that speak of techno feudalism for instance and i need to emphasize that this is capitalism the fact that we add the intellectual monopoly to the to how we label it is just to emphasize on on the changes and the evolution capitalism is a way of producing that is constantly evolving and changing itself and we should be at the frontier in trying to rethink for instance of the political subject with these transformations at hand and reflecting on these transformations so i think we need to move beyond capitalism which at the same time nowadays means moving beyond intellectual monopoly capitalism but it's not just neoliberalism i think we need to move beyond capitalism and to do it of course it's not simple and i've been reflecting on this for many many years but i would say about the question of the subject that there is no that is not a subject but a diversity and plurality of subjects and i think that we need to try to work on combining reinforcing and potentiating all the different fights and i would like to quickly think about it is think about gender and and the patriarchal society we live in we need to also think about the ecological disasters we need to think about the appropriation of knowledge and and the appropriation of data we also need to think about the typical ways of reflecting on capital and labor dynamics so we need unions as much as we need to think of alternative ways of organizing grassroots movements cooperatives that share knowledge and share between each other and that try to produce in different ways i don't think there is one subject actually but multiple and we still need to be creating enough to create new ways of organizing from yeah together beyond the what we already have at hand thank you i would like to propose a similar question to you illa but with a slight twist and that is that when you speak about platform cobs what i always find curious about this notion is that on one hand these individuals who do that they want to go against platform capitalism they want to position themselves in opposition to that but they use the the market form in order to fight against big tech but they're nevertheless building markets themselves so so when we think about these subjects who are building these alternative platforms using the market tool in order to potentially move us beyond capitalism i would like to hear maybe your take on this is it possible to to employ market structures to move us beyond the current configuration of big tech or is it is it inherently doomed to fail yeah i i guess the fact that most of these platform coops are really struggling uh and financially that already speaks to what you suggest right but i i think it has to be a combination of things and i i fully agree when you say we have a we have a multiplicity a plurality of subjects but the chance is actually if platform coops for instance or other kinds of organizations that really try to conquer big tech within a certain market i think their chance could be to introduce a new subject that we don't know of yet and that hardly does not exist anywhere and that could be new stakeholder groups as i proposed before comments public partnerships or other forms where stakeholders get together that that normally do not define markets but for instance just just to give a brief example um so fair b and b what they are doing basically is to offer short-term rentals just as air b and b does but they are organized as a cooperative and they have um local a local board within the coops so there's municipalities involved uh city councils people from the neighborhood etc etc so what they're doing is to introduce a new stakeholder group a new subject if if you want that becomes more visible because there are more people united there coming from their own respective communities and backgrounds but uniting into one subject and i think in order to succeed on the market and even if it's an alternative market there has to be more to it than just putting a product out there uh it's really it's a combination of effective communication it's introducing new stakeholder groups that have the capacity and power to build infrastructure it is and that is the biggest challenge so far coming up with a product that is attractive enough for people to really you know make them want to use it because to be very honest a lot of these products compared to uh you know to i don't know uh the the outlets of big tax they have a hard time to deliver as much as as as these products do so there's still a lot of work to do but i would definitely say it's a dream to think that it's enough to put out whatever on the market and you will succeed i don't think it's possible there has to be much more and ultimately i think it's also a matter of the storytelling connected to to this effort to this work because it's also about enhancing people's imagination that it makes sense to to support that right so it's quite complex i guess okay before we open up to the to the thumb and to get your perspectives in just um one last time giving it to you max similar question also the question of of um who is the subject that can potentially achieve this transformation and for you specifically you were you appointed towards the need for for breaking up what i'm asking myself is well you also characterize big tech as being immensely powerful on the european level influencing the dsa etc well who then could be the actor the group the network what kind of group an actor network do we need to break up these monopoles do we have this group this network already or does it need to be built well i would agree with cecilia uh on the question who is the subject we need a multiplicity of the subjects and if i come may come back to the case of amazon because i've been haunted by this also for a couple of months uh thinking about this amazon is a company where you have many people who are not really happy with the way it's things are going right and you have trade unions you have digital data protection organizations you have environmental organizations or people who think about climate policy and many are affected by what amazon and its monopoly power are doing and i think only the multiplicity of uh those challenging the power can can win this fight and i would argue it's it's really time in europe to to to build up an anti monopoly movement that challenges monopoly power and goes beyond the yeah the the economy that we have at the moment which is very much dominated by large scale companies that also dominate decision-making we really need to go beyond that now i would like to open the discussion to to all of you and we have uh we will we will um collect a couple of questions i think three max to the audience i see one person in the back before before you start speaking just like uh trying to see a couple more hands so i can i can anybody else who wants to who wants to speak okay one two three there okay so we start with you at the very top yeah thank you the can i ask two questions the first is very quick do you really believe that the politics that our governments are a channel that will lead this transition um do you think they are prepared for this institutionally and my second kind of inspiration is that when i saw you standing there aila and saying we need more inter-cooperation i absolutely agree we need this and we i think share this with a lot of people since a long time that this is kind of the path to go so i was wondering why don't we call for a conference which is focused exclusively on inter-cooperation among us and every single session is designed to sign a contract among the members who are there to create a new inter-cooperation because it's just not happening and it's the path we need to take thanks okay is politics an actor that can do these changes and why don't we cooperate more concretely in a separate conference okay we will take the second question here on the on the left side from my perspective oh the third question sorry um yeah i actually also have two kind of um like notion questions or i didn't understand what exactly you were referring to partially um so the one of them is what is the cloud that you kept mentioning and the other one is what uh platform cooperatives compared to just cooperatives or what yeah so maybe maybe it was clear for everyone but um yeah thank you perfect thank you um and then we'll take uh the the final question for this round here uh sorry i'll chase you all through the room you have to walk all the way over here and the question is over there and then we will give it to the to the plenary do any of you think the european dependency on those big tech companies has to be resolved before we can take action against them or do you think it's part of the process did you know i didn't get the last one can you the dependence of the eu on these companies depends on what yes so the eu depends on the cloud that is provided by the american companies right do you think it is part of the process of building platform alternatives or federating or annihilating those companies or breaking them up or as he said um do you think we need to become independent from their cloud services before we do that or can we do it in the process perfect now we got you the problem was we didn't hear the microphone on stage now we do everything is crystal clear okay we have a set of questions um i'll just let's start with you cecilia pick out the questions that you feel most emboldened to answer okay so about politics part of what i was trying to show is that core states are to some extent aligned with these companies and even if they battle against them it's not because they are trying to defend the people in general that doesn't mean that states in general cannot play a role i think they can and they are still uh sphere where we can try to push them to do so but it will definitely need grassroots movements organizations that aren't and and not only to push the state but also to build alternatives at the same time so back to the first question thank you very much for asking what the cloud is because i actually think that perhaps many of you haven't heard of that before the way so usually companies and individuals used to just have everything in their computers so if i was using microsoft office i would typically have a cd for instance just installed in my and installed that in my computer i would have all my data in my computer what happened around 15 20 years ago was that a technology was developed that enables all this to be separated from my specific computer and i am speaking from an individual perspective but you can also think in terms of an organization so a company or the state so instead of having the software installed in the computer now we have apps which means that we have things operating through our computers but they are always connected to the internet and actually we don't own them what we do is we loan them we rent access to microsoft office for instance not only access to microsoft office we also rent access to their servers to store our data there and what companies do think for instance of uber or netflix or semen so i'm speaking about large companies big pharma what they do they move their operations to the cloud which means that they no longer have the data in their own data centers in their offices and buildings but in the data centers owned by let's say google or amazon or microsoft they use the services provided by these companies to analyze the data so they use the algorithms provided by these companies of course uber or netflix will also have developers that are complementing the provided services to make them specific to fulfill the needs of netflix or uber but they will still rely on them think of uber uber works with google maps if it's not google maps is ways both belong to google it uses amazon web services as its cloud business therefore all the data goes to the cloud and is processed by it so there is also a hierarchy of platforms it's not the same to be uber than to be google or to be amazon that's why big tech also are so important and that's why the cloud is so important it's the infrastructure that underlies all the platforms and this is also why it's quite impossible to live without them there is a very interesting new york times article where a journalist tried to live without big tech for i think a month and she failed because there are so many things that rely on these companies that just by saying i will not consume this will not work and then the final question was more about what is there an alternative for the european union if they pursue a policy like the ill equipped i'm sorry and you can reply afterwards as the ill equipped digital markets act no the digital markets act is only looking at these companies as market gatekeepers and their knowledge and data gatekeepers but the EU i think that is not really willing to regulate these companies as intellectual monopolies because although the EU the european union doesn't have big tech intellectual monopolies it does have big pharma as intellectual monopolies it has semen here in this country among many other companies that operate as intellectual monopolies so as far as i know the EU is actually thinking of its cloud as to some extent relying on these companies and it cannot escape from that could it do it it needs to invest a lot in one digital infrastructure to a lot of AI algorithms and wait and put all the data there i don't see it quite feasible i don't say that it's impossible but i do think that it would involve a huge poll like political commitment that i don't see the EU really wanting to pursue max do you want to chime in and respond to some of these questions yeah but um cecilia i have to admit that i don't have any counterargument in in this case i i don't want to counter argue here in this case i but what i want to would want to answer one of the questions that came from from the audience where i feel entitled to say something about i i think there is a certain political will to to challenge the power of big tech um the digital markets act was the first step to do this even though it challenges only its market power agree but the data protection issues they are for instance i mean one major problem the US is it doesn't enforce its rules for instance the the GDPR the general data protection directive is not properly enforced otherwise we would be in a different situation um but my main point is actually uh without social movements i think policymakers won't won't really uh make big steps so i think the the pressure from social movements and actually transatlantic social movements for instance challenging the power of amazon i like to repeat this um would be very fruitful and it would be wise to work for transatlantic movements even global movements would be better but i see a certain chance to to make steps forwards um in creating alternatives in challenging the power of big tech and in uh creating a more democratic global society overall even though we can't see that at the moment i i would share the hope also with others uh that it's it's it's time to act now thank you max and illa uh you would be the last person to answer these so this round of questions and you would also have the final words of this panel so okay uh well then i would start by answering your question thanks for asking what are platform co-ops so basically um platform co-ops are it can be cooperatives but do not necessarily have to be cooperatives it can be other organizations that are organized a set around a set of rules or bylaws and that are commonly governed let's say um so platform co-op um is organized around a digital service can be a marketplace or a digital software whatever and it's very often the workers of that cooperative who organize around that software around the digital market whatever um and in doing so they address a different group of consumers they try to enter and compete on the same market as you just uh mentioned and ultimately what they want to provide is an alternative to the monopolies of the market economy and this is also what we have discussed that it's of course uh it's really the david engoliat um perspective that you can put on here but that's basically platform cooperativism it's building an alternative based on a cooperative form and um i would like to uh to just address the inter-cooperation question an inter-cooperation for those who wonder what it means is nothing else than incentivizing organizations to work with other cooperative organizations rather than um yeah then then getting services from a market monopoly and this is a political question then and that maybe is an indirect answer to to your question around is is politics is that actually the arena to bring about that change it might be interesting to discuss if there would be incentives for uh platform co-ops or other alternative uh economies to really incentivize inter-cooperation in such a manner that there would be tax reliefs or there would be uh any forms of rewards for organization working with each other and in doing so establishing an infrastructure that can help maybe breaking the power of big tech one day and that would be a really interesting incentive i guess about europe uh and the endeavor to build like independence i think europe is really thinking about that since quite a number of years there has been projects like gaya x and they have not been really successful and this also brings me to thinking about whether this whole discussion around europe being like completely independent building its own thing there's a number of problems with that it's first of all it's the stakeholders that have been discussed or that have been involved in that project i find have not been uh what i said before like a really novel super diverse group the whole the whole framework of how this project started is a very traditional framework i would also like to question the the the european uh reference at all how useful is it to discuss such a question uh um you know with a with a european reference who can actually who can refer to it but that's uh it's a different question but so far i think we do not have any example of europe creating their own data structure their own data infrastructure and very often europeans tend to say yeah but we have our own values we have our own long history of values and i find that also a bit strange because i don't think that europe has a really exceptional set of values in opposite to united states or other countries to be very honest and i could give a lot of reasons for that but i'm not going to do that now and yeah what else i have the feeling i should say something very clever now if i have the already did you already if i have the last word but i maybe we leave it at that perfect thank you so much um we didn't agree on on every single thing on this panel expropriating breaking up etc we also didn't come up with a with a blueprint for moving beyond capitalism maybe that was we aimed a bit too high but i do think that we have figured out a lot of interesting things that that are shared across the panelists here for example the need for a transnational movement that initiates a greater resistance we have also agreed that there is not one revolutionary subject that can make us move beyond intellectual monopoly capitalism but that there are actually many diverse subjects so i think we've found some common ground here which is important to move this debate further so thank you so much to max for being with us online thank you so much to sicilia thank you so much to illa and thanks to all of you and we hope you stick around for the for the wrap-up of the conference and then also of course for the party later on so hopefully see you there and thanks a lot again