 Digital platforms, they of course, we all know that and that I assume to be some sort of you know common phrase But they have created enormous benefits and very powerful global connections Let me say that first of all because I know I know Is there anyone in this room who has not been using one of the big five platforms over the let's say the past week? You must have been on vacation to some kind of remote area where they don't have We are not connection. There's no connection to the internet or something So anyway, we all know how much we have become dependent on these platforms, but since 2016 Problems have been mounting for the tech companies and we you probably have heard about the tech lash Which has introduced that sort of you know mounting problems We have been talking about disinformation and fake news a lot hate speech and trolling was much into the news We have heard much about the election intervention particularly the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal It's probably still fresh on your mind, but that as if that wasn't enough We have had privacy scandals. We've had security leaks and of course Totally different venue. We've had tax evasion and undermining of labor laws and that now I'm just stopping here because you would be totally depressed before I even have to start at the lecture There's lots about you know addiction, etc. etc My conclusion so far would be the long-standing values that promote an open society and by that I mean tolerance democracy fairness I will come back to that the compromised in the online world and that's a world that is dominated by mostly American digital platforms So my leading question today will be how can we anchor public values in an open? Digital society or all the open digital societies in Europe Pretty much. How could we use data for the public good in an online world? That is almost entirely dependent on a private American ecosystem of platforms. I will come to that So over the next 40 minutes or so, I will take you through these four Speaking points. This is sort of an outline. I will first explain to you what I mean by platform Ecosystems what I mean by public values. We're all talking about public values. What kind of values are they? Who are responsible actors in this digital society and what particularly are the challenges of Europe? Toby already pointed to that Now, let me begin by explaining to you. What platforms seek the ecosystems are how do they operate and how do we encounter them in the wild? Pretty much in our global online world You know that is a world that is driven by platforms and those platforms are fueled by data flows now Platforms and data flows can be steered by companies either companies or states and the two platform ecosystems that dominate the online world are what I call the American platform ecosystem and the Chinese platform ecosystem and of course Squeezed in between the US and China is this continent and This our European continent has pretty much no major platforms This one is the only major European platform in the global top 50. Anyone guess can guess who did which one it is Yes, Spotify actually on that top 50 of most important platforms, it's number 49, so it's not that big but More importantly, it's no longer fully European 10 sentence Spotify have now minority shares in each other and it's Spotify is actually actually listed on the New York Stock Exchange so in short for online infrastructural services Europe has become largely dependent on the American platform ecosystem and Here you can read that this was actually these numbers are from last year the corporate headquarters of the largest players By market capitalization. They're very unevenly spread geographically 47% located in Asia 36% in North America and 15% in Europe and The most important thing is that of those 15% Platforms in Europe Europe has very few unicorns as Tonya has Skype for instance But that is now become Microsoft Sexify has become a quite a big one has become a uniform a unicorn. It's now owned by vault It's now called vote a vault and at Jen Which is a Dutch company that there's a pay service which you may probably not know But those are pretty big platforms The problem is there neither of those platforms have important Infrastructural positions and I will come to that in just a second When we talk about platform power, it's very important to distinguish the various levels of platform power It's actually Distributed at three levels and I compare that to a tree just to stay in kind with the ecosystem metaphor We have the roots which is pretty much the internet architecture It's the digital infrastructure of hardware of ISPs internet service providers But also satellites and data centers domain names It's the big infrastructure that the whole tree basically relies on Now this part I have not we have not included in our research It was just too much because we have concentrated on the middle and the upper part of the tree And that's the trunk and the branches the trunk by that. I mean the the infrastructural intermediary platforms and we'll come to that in a second and Secondly, I'll concentrate on the branches, which is pretty much the sectoral platforms I will explain that to you in just a second Most importantly most important about this slide is to remember that these the big five company Ownership is now Distributed both among its roots the internet architecture as well as that intermediary level as well as the sectoral branches Where it's spreading its powers. Okay, so this is just a visual to remind you or to remember when we talk about Platform infrastructure. It's a hard thing to imagine, but I try to make it more clear In the Gafem American Gafem systems American platform company companies are driven by You know nuts. Well, of course by market value in terms of market value the big these big five They formed the world's fifth largest economy after the US China Germany Japan But more important. I think more important than market value. It's about societal power and influence These big five increasingly act as gatekeepers to all kinds of social economic cultural and personal online traffic and that's what you also see in the branches, so Our focus has been on the trunk and the branches and how those In how these these two interact to the intermediary and the sectoral platforms Let's start with those intermediary infrastructural platforms How do the big five company? Companies actually wield those strategic platforms and by that I mean we have made an inventory of what those infrastructural intermediary platforms are we have We have found some 70 that we would call infrastructural, but that's disputable for instance social networks like the Facebook Blue app but also Of course any other social networks Web hosting base systems identification services cloud services Advertising agency search engines, of course operating systems navigation maps Messenger services app stores analytic services, and there's about 70 of those Now society is across the globe and particularly also in Europe They have come to depend on this infrastructure for organizing all kinds of societal sectors, right? so and Rather than having private infrastructure of a public infrastructures We increasingly see that platformization also means privatization Now there's a big debate whether We should call these particularly intermediary services these infrastructural services whether we should call them utilities and Because they have been come privatized. That's a huge debate I'm not going into that because it's pretty much a legal debate But it's actually very difficult for lawmakers to define which platforms are utilities or infrastructures and which are not So that's an incredibly refined, you know legal debate Now each of those platforms well the whole platform ecosystem in fact is built on commercial values They're driven by market forces at the market forces of efficiency Monetization and of course dominance because it's all about marking market dominance But what about public values? That's what I stated in my initial questions What about public values and the common good? Now Europe different from America from China on the other hand has substantial public sectors and public space which pretty much seems to be absent from the American ecosystem and Public values appear to sit in tension and that's why we've had I think those problems over the past few years They sit in tension with the commercial values that structure Gaphems our architecture the trunk particularly of the platforms Now first before we continue talking about public values What are we in fact talking about what kind of values do I consider to be important public values? first of all those values are Very basic values that pertain to our online interaction and online society Values like security transparency accuracy and privacy. We've heard much about that you may expand this into values like autonomy very basic human values and These values of course, they're not fixed You know you can't go just go to a store and you know pick them off the shelf and buy them like they are Values are often negotiated and they're negotiated at different levels For instance when Google tries to implement its its educational platforms in schools What we're what we see happening is that? Privacy the value of privacy of students may sit in tension with transparency and that transparency may be a very valuable Public notion because for instance schools could be opening up their data on children's progress to the public or to research So those values may sit in tension and needs need negotiation But beyond in you know those precise values to be beyond Internet and consumer values There are public values that pertain to Society as a whole and those values. They're not exhaustive, but they include fairness inclusiveness responsibility accountability and of course democratic control and These values are negotiated at every single level Starting with the transnational level in Europe at the state level local levels But also at the institutional level, you know all the way down to the professional coach that for instance teachers or journalists Have anchored somehow in their societal and how they perform their societal roles Interestingly or perhaps sadly connective platforms often bypass or ignore those You know sectors and those where those values are negotiated for instance Institutions or professional codes they go straight to individual consumers. I was just talking about education What we're seeing is that individual schools are being offered? Google apps for education and even Chrome laptops at very, you know low prices a hundred and fifty bucks Which is way underpriced, but that's of course because because Google can earn it back in other sectors or to other services Facebook for instance it bypasses news organizations because it refuses to carry the label media company and hence it ducks regulation so Public values have become Increasingly important. I think not just to our European system platform ecosystem But to the entire world and that brings up the bigger question. Who is actually responsible for the platform society? You know these public values as I said, they don't just exist. They need to be negotiated at every single level and The very simple answer to this question is we are all responsible for governing the digital society But analytically and this is sort of you know a lesson I took from politically economy 101 Analytically, there's three types of actors market state and civil society, right in China as we just see State actors dominate in the US Excuse me market actors dominate the stage in Europe Ideally, there's an emphasis on civil society and state actors in balance with market actors So in fact, you know, there's a few simple rules in Europe data are preferably owned by their citizens That's why we put so much emphasis on privacy European nations prefer to operate in multi-stakeholder organizations. So, you know to balance off those three different societal actors But there's three problems with implementing public values in the European platform society first Those civil society actors. There is systematically underrepresented in the ecosystem and particularly in the infrastructural part of that ecosystem second problem There's hardly any public space in the American platform ecosystem hardly any to come by and The third problem is that data You know generated mostly by civilians by citizens by users or buyers Those data become mostly proprietary so they cannot be used for the public good So those are three major problems. We are we have to deal with we need to articulate Value-centric principles at the European level and now this could be many different sort of principles And I totally agree if you say you can't do that just top down at the European level But that's not what I mean. I buy a few principles I mean very, you know simple principles from which nations and local authorities and institutions Where they can actually look up to and say, okay, that's what we stand for and then they can start negotiated Those public values themselves. So what kind of principles would could those be for instance about data ownership? very simple rule four words data belong to citizens and that of course has everything to do with privacy, but you know the the on the other hand open data belong to the public and By open data, I mean that there is reciprocity between those, you know, open up those data and Usually after that they're becoming privatized as I just showed in the educational world by those companies Open data reciprocity means there's it's a two-lane traffic, right? So that could be a very simple rule Data portability you can carry data around to different platforms very simple rule We could have that at the European level and then work it into the various other, you know levels of implementation data transparency data flows could be regulated like money flows We all you know found are perfectly comfortable with the fact that banks are being Looked upon as you know, they are in control of data flows and states are actually controlling true accountants For instance, how those data data flows are governed. We could do a similar Implement a similar sort of governance with data flows. Why not? We just have to you know be inventive and Finally software ownership Open source when open source is possible not simply, you know privatized by default, but if you put up open source as a viable alternative and also Supported, I think that would they be make a major difference. I think many of us especially, you know People in Europe who have been complaining about American platform companies a lot over the past few years I was one of them if we feel squeezed between those two ecosystems made in China made in the USA It's time to rethink our own architecture our design and the governance of platforms Indeed as I said, we're all responsible for creating a fair open digital society and by all I mean I don't know how many there are in this room, but engineers. I mean policymakers. I mean regulators I also mean academics like myself, but particularly also civilians who care for the society They live in who want to govern it democratically. I think we all need to collaborate on design and on governance of these platforms The current tech lash as I've just been describing or in the beginning of my talk that tech lash doesn't necessarily lead into a dystopian future I refuse to believe that there is necessarily this brings us into some kind of dystopia And I see very encouraging signs coming from public counter power in the online world We see many local initiatives for instance taken by the city I'm now involved with several of these initiatives in the city of Amsterdam several cities in the Netherlands with Public broadcast systems and a lot of public Organizations who want to collaborate and provide alternatives We need those initiatives and need to support civil society efforts Also raising awareness at both the national level and the in a super national level and I really believe over the past year I think actually after we fit had already finished the book so it I'm so sorry I couldn't put it in anymore, but I really believe there has been more awareness and more consciousness about What non-profit civil sector? civil society actors could do on this level so on closing with that hopeful note there's certainly a lot of hope in that area and The idea of platform counter power will hopefully be the topic of my next book. So I will leave you with that thought