Law for the Platform Economy

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* Article: Law for the Platform Economy. By Julie E. Cohen. 51 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 133-2014 (2017)

URL = https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/141869903.pdf


Abstract

"This Article explores patterns of legal-institutional change in the emerging, platform-driven economy. Its starting premise is that the platform is not simply a new business model, a new social technology, or a new infrastructural formation (although it is also all of those things). Rather, it is the core organizational form of the emerging informational economy. Platforms do not enter or expand markets; they replace (and rematerialize) them. The article argues that legal institutions, including both entitlements and regulatory institutions, have systematically facilitated the platform economy’s emergence. It first describes the evolution of the platform as a mode of economic (re)organization and introduces the ways that platforms restructure both economic exchange and patterns of information flow more generally. It then explores some of the ways that actions and interventions by and on behalf of platform businesses are reshaping the landscape of legal entitlements and obligations. Finally, it describes challenges that platform-based intermediation of the information environment has posed for existing regulatory institutions and traces some of the emerging institutional responses."


Contents

"Part I describes the evolution of the platform as a mode of economic (re)organization and introduces the ways that platforms restructure both economic exchange and patterns of information flow more generally.

Part II explores some of the ways that actions and interventions by and on behalf of platform businesses are reshaping the landscape of legal entitlements and obligations.

Part III describes challenges that platform-based intermediation of the information environment has posed for existing regulatory institutions and traces some of the emerging institutional responses.

Part IV concludes and suggests some lessons for the project of “future-proofing law.”


Excerpts

A Polanyian Interpretation of Informational Capitalism

Julie Cohen:

"In the book in progress from which this Article is adapted, I frame the emergence of informational capitalism in terms of three large-scale developments that parallel those identified by political economist Karl Polanyi as framing the emergence of industrial capitalism. Polanyi mapped a “great transformation” in the system of political economy that involved appropriation of newly important resources but that also moved on conceptual and organizational levels. The basic factors of industrial production — land, labor, and money — were reconceptualized as commodities, while at the same time patterns of barter and exchange became detached from local communities and reembedded in the constructed mechanism of the market. Three analogous shifts frame the transformation that is now underway: the propertization of intangible resources, the concurrent dematerialization and datafication of the basic factors of industrial production, and the embedding of patterns of barter and exchange within information platforms."

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/141869903.pdf