Cornering the Competition and the Tyranny of Code

Dear Reader,

It’s been a dramatic month in contestations around what is called ‘intermediary liability,’ with the furor over Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest in France over criminal activity taking place on the platform, as well as the outright ban of X in Brazil after Elon Musk refused to comply with its Supreme Court’s directives on taking down content. Many in the tech community have decried these events as an assault on freedom, and the attempt to subordinate the internet’s neutral terrain to various national jurisdictions. However, as more astute analysts point out, such framings are disingenuous. Forms of censorship are rampant under Big Tech’s watch, and the internet has in fact always been subject to national jurisdictions, in particular that of the United States. What is new here is that other, unexpected actors are choosing to intervene and challenge the unregulated giants of social media. While these developments may well be over-determined by geo-political and other concerns, they also seem to indicate a growing sense that the societal costs of today’s disinformation circuits have become exorbitant.

The salience of this issue in the public imagination does not stop here. In fact, this month saw the final meeting of the Digital Economy Working Group ahead of this year’s G20 Summit in November. A notable highlight of the Ministerial Declaration was that, in addition to continuing work on expanding connectivity and collaborating for digital public infrastructures, there was a statement foregrounding ‘Information Integrity’ and prioritizing cooperation in order to cope with the challenges that contemporary digital media pose. Given the G20’s growing prominence as a vehicle for global coordination on digital governance, the elevation of this track of discussion under the Brazilian presidency signals a significant and widespread recognition of the imperative to tackle this problem. 

In other news, the antitrust push against dominant players continued to gather steam in September. Indeed, after the landmark ruling against Google’s search business, the US Department of Justice has now brought charges accusing the company of being a monopolist in the digital advertising market as well. Again, potential repercussions of being convicted here include being forced to drastically re-organize its business models or even break it into different arms. Parallelly, a Washington DC appeals court has also revived an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon’s e-commerce practices. 

Big Tech’s legal fortunes have not fared much better in Europe. This month saw the continent’s highest court side against them in two high-profile cases. First, Apple was ruled to have received illegal support from Ireland’s tax policies, and ordered to hand over €13 billion in unpaid taxes. Second, the European Commision’s fines against Google’s anti-competitive behavior were upheld and the company’s appeals quashed, forcing it to also pay €2.42 billion. Of course, these amounts do not significantly disarm the financial power of these companies. Yet, they do set the precedent of holding them accountable and help facilitate the more aggressive regulatory challenges that have been growing in number against these tech barons. 

Moving to the labor front, this month saw Singapore pass its Platform Worker Bill, which while stopping short of recognizing gig work as full-fledged employment, does create the legal standing for ride-hailing and delivery workers to be given additional job protections and insurance coverage, provident funds, and the right to organize collectively. This may remain a compromise, but it creates the momentum for shifting the consensus on these issues. With renewed calls for such interventions in other jurisdictions in Southeast Asia already ringing out, it seems to mark a promising development. 

Coming back to this month’s issue, we bring you analysis and commentary from different conjunctures of the Global South’s platform economies. Our first piece chronicles how the battle between app stores and developers is playing out in the Indian context, and deliberates on some of the policy responses that have been proposed. Our second piece of the month draws on first-hand empirical research with workers in Africa, in order to shed light on the novel kinds of economic domination being engendered in algorithmically mediated labor. 

The DataSyn Team

THE POLICY TABLE

Developers vs. App Stores: A Case for Separation Remedies 

Madhavi Singh 

In recent months, we have witnessed a promising and novel vigor for taking up antitrust complaints and challenging Big Tech’s monopolies across jurisdictions in the name of fair competition. In the midst of this climate, one battle that is yet to fully play out is the one against the gatekeeping privileges of app stores. Our Big Tech and Society fellow, Madhavi Singh, reports on the unfolding of this controversy within the Indian context, and critically examines some ideas for a substantive solution.

Read on.

THE BIG EXCESS

Algorithmic Shackles: Eroding Worker Autonomy in the Majority World  

Adio-Adet Dinika

While many laud the new and dynamic possibilities that digitally mediated work can bring about, an urgent question that confronts those in the Global South is the manner in which these new technological paradigms interact with existing - and deeply unequal -  economic structures. Drawing on his own research in Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, Adio-Adet Dinika reflects, on the worrying continuities between the algorithmic tyranny workers face today, and the economic subjugation of their colonial pasts.

Read on.

The Sins & Synergies Lounge 

• One of the landmark compendiums in the field, be sure to check out the newest iteration of UNCTAD’s Digital Economy Report. The 2024 edition is titled ‘Shaping an environmentally sustainable and inclusive digital future,’ and zeroes in on the urgent questions of the ecological backdrop to digitalization, as well as the disproportionate share of this burden that falls on the developing world. 

• The paradigm of platformized labor is often touted for its efficiency in matching workers and consumers. Yet, what is the actual foundation of this algorithmically instituted practice? In a provocative and perspicacious new study, Workers Info Exchange alleges that it is built on a workforce forcibly placed on standby without pay. A practice that amounted to $1.9 billion in losses for gig workers in 2023. Read more in their full report. 

• Ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity's COP16, check out this timely and accessible briefing paper from the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), together with Third World Network (TWN) and the ETC Group about the risks, hype, and inequities underpinning generative biology.

• Also hard to miss is this investigative piece by David Sirota on the lobbying efforts of Big Tech to kill two California bills that would have forced certain tech companies to pay news outlets millions of dollars for using or linking to news content, as well as implementing a tax on user data extracted for advertising purposes, with proceeds going to a newsroom fund.

• Lastly, to stimulate your thoughts, tune in to this conversation with Helen Hester on thinking about emancipatory framings of automation and a post-work world. In particular, how might we reflect on the place of reproductive labor in imagined futures of socialized care? 

Post-script

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