Platform competition shifts from price to data as the competitive criterion

Evidence

The challenge today, however, is that capital investment is not sufficient to overturn monopolies; access to data, network effects, and path dependency place even higher hurdles in the way of overcoming a monopoly like Google. This does not mean the end of competition or of the struggle for market power, but it means a change in the form of competition. In particular, this is a shift away from competition over prices (e.g. many services are offered for free). Here we come to an essential point. Unlike in manufacturing, in platforms competitiveness is not judged solely by the criterion of a maximal difference between costs and prices; data collection and analysis also contribute to how competitiveness is judged and ranked. This means that, if these platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data – and they must invest in the fixed capital to do so. — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 81

Categorization

• XREF: The move from price-competition to data-competition is the sharpest contrast with Zuboff — her ‘behavioral surplus’ framing vs. Srnicek’s argument that data is simply a new competitive input within capitalism, not a break from it. — connects to: Platform power rests on structural influence over data, not revenue size. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 206; Platform monopolies are also monopsonies over the data users produce — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 174; Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 17 (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Defines what ‘competitiveness’ means under platform capitalism: data extraction intensity, not cost-minus-price margin.

Related

• Platform companies converge into similar forms as they compete for the same data. (similarity 0.89)
• Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies (similarity 0.88)
• Competition among platforms produces four systemic tendencies in the economy (similarity 0.86)
• Data extraction needs force previously separate platforms into direct competition. (similarity 0.86)
• Monopoly practices protect data supply routes rather than raising prices (similarity 0.85)
• Platform monopolies are also monopsonies over the data users produce (similarity 0.84)
• Network effects embed monopoly tendencies directly into platform structure (similarity 0.83)
• Industrial platforms extract data to cement monopolies over global manufacturing (similarity 0.82)
• Platforms remain bound to capitalist competition and profitability despite anti-capitalist rhetoric (similarity 0.82)
• Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale (similarity 0.82)
• Falling recording costs turned data from peripheral to central capitalist resource. (similarity 0.81)
• Platform power rests on structural influence over data, not revenue size. (similarity 0.81)
• Platforms are the first business model with data extraction built into their core DNA (similarity 0.80)
• The Big Five carve up the data economy under informal noncompetition that blocks rivals (similarity 0.80)
• Advertising platforms sell analysed targeting promises, not raw data (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Data extraction needs force previously separate platforms into direct competition. #expands (0.85) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 90
• Competition among platforms produces four systemic tendencies in the economy #expands (0.78) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 82
• Markets in future behavior emerged from Google’s predictive analysis of data exhaust #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1066