Regulation of platforms and national project
Cesar Bolaño[1]
Recovering content can be futile, without a step forward. The country needs to develop its own intermediary and application platforms – and stop depending on Big Techs. It is possible, as we show China and its initiatives in Health
Last April 25, the Brazilian Internet Management Committee held a seminar, in Brazil, on the occasion of the launch of public consultation on the regulation of digital platforms. Representatives of the government, the academy, the business community and the third sector will participate, forming a panel that is representative of the current debate on the topic in Brazilian civil society. Two themes will dominate the presentation: the controversial idea of content regulation, which is without doubt or great north of two arguments for and against regulation in the country, is the perspective of defense of concurrence.
Both problems are important, but my objective here is to highlight a third order of questions that should not be the center of the debate, linked to the current need for a new national development project. By way of comparison, I will refer, very briefly, to the emblematic Chinese case, but also to the notable program relating to the Complexo Econômico-Industrial da Saúde, developed by a large network of Brazilian researchers. This text is not dealing with PL 2630 in discussion at the Congress. Minha tese is that the regulation of platforms in Brazil should be thought, from the beginning, in terms of the possibilities of solving urgent social problems and promoting, at the same time, alternatives for development.
First of all, it is necessary to differentiate the technical phenomenon of networks and platforms, derived from the microelectronic and computing revolution – which dates back to the productive restructuring that followed the structural crisis in the 1970s – given that the companies that play a predominant role in the internet economy. When a laboratory, for example, is associated with a certain vaccine platform, it becomes part of a knowledge production network, not within which its researchers comprise a collective worker, to use Marx's expression, responsible for the search for solutions for a given public health problem. This is the material side of things: the organization of network work through platforms and not necessarily platform companies. These are only undertakings that are only intended to explore the profit potential that that type of production organization offers. In the first case, it deals with the development of productive forces, in the second, in the relations of production, which are also divided into two types: a fundamental capital-labor relation, established at the microeconomic level, and a relation of purchase and sale of two products or services, defined in the plan of realization of the value of markets, not market.
This is an important distinction, which in view of the current event, in certain academic circles, gives a confusing notion of the prosumer proposed by the American futurist Alvin Tofler. Without entering here there is no debate (see Bolaño & Vieira, 2014), the existence of this type of interpretation is explained by the fact that the internet and the digital platforms are unified in good measure as the forms of control of work and society, constituting common mechanisms of business management and surveillance in the mass. From the point of view of regulation, it is, on the one hand, specifically, in the Brazilian case today, under the command of a left-wing government, of restoring, not least, in extremely adverse conditions, the mechanisms of defense of workers, destroyed throughout the neoliberal period, especially after the 2016 coup. An even more complex problem will be considered as particularities of two new production processes mediated by platforms. Just to cite an example, it is not trivial to identify the interests of self-employed workers exploited by platforms such as Uber and those two salaried workers of the so-called industrial platforms, in the classification of Srnicek (2018), includes all of them, part of the “class that lives in work”, to use Ricardo Antunes's expression (2007).
Not that it says respect for the consumer, the user, or great debate concentrates on advertising platforms, such as Google and Facebook. Only taken as a paradigm, when in fact there are particular cases, even though they are obviously of great interest, they are due to the magnitude of the phenomenon, due to their importance in the consolidation of the new global system of culture, which subsumes the new Cultural Industry of the 20th century. This system enhances the advertising and propaganda functions that define the particular sector of monopolistic capital as playing a key role in the legitimacy of the system of domination, as an instrument of manipulation and social control. A distinctive aspect of the new global system of culture, arising from the development of the internet, platforms and social networks, is interativity, a characteristic historically claimed by defenders of democratization of two means of communication. Furthermore, the interactivity that actually exists does not correspond to the demand – subject to the fact that it is, on the one hand, to a type of algorithmic media served by the owners of the platforms or, on the other hand, to the strategic action of anti-democratic groups –, or the regulation of the contents may be more of a problem than a solution.
But there are other platforms, for the sale of products, digital or not, specialized platforms, for different types of services, including financial, logistics, etc., or what is lived here is a complex process of platformization of the general economy that does not allow us to think of a “platform” regulation as a set and isolated from politics economic and social policy. Thus, we have already seen that, in the case of work, it is not simply a question of platform regulation, but rather of recovery (in order not to make progress) of the historical achievements of the working class, which certainly demonstrates the need for a national development project. On the other hand, in the case of advertising platforms referring to the question of regulation or social control in mass communication, or that is also related to the question of development, we will think, for example, in a recent discussion on the limits of systemic competitiveness in the sector. cultural-communicational, given to concentration of national audiovisual production. What is defended here is that it is possible to define a general regulatory framework, segmented in function of the determinations of material and formal order referred to above, subordinated to a common logic of economic and social development.
In this sense, I adopt here a taxonomy recently presented by Van Dijk (2022), which classifies platforms on three levels, using the metaphor of a tree that, as it grows, alters the configuration of its constituent parts and the relationships between them. The roots represent hardware, devices and protocols that constitute the material infrastructure, as the trunk is formed by the intermediary platforms that offer identification or login services, payment systems, messaging services, social networks, search mechanisms, advertising services, sharing networks and application stores. There we meet the greats players North American global companies, known as GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Meta-Facebook) and Chinese, known as BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). Finally, “we represent the sectoral applications built on platform services in the intermediate layer (trunk) and enabled by the digital infrastructure (roots)” (Van Dijck, 2022, p. 28) and include the services of news, mobility, health, education, finance, etc. On the contrary, companies located outside the trunk, these form a multidão em expansão that other authors, such as Neto, Chiarini and Ribeiro (2022), citing extensive bibliography, define us using the suggestive name of platform-dependent business.
In this case, we find companies that, individually, according to Van Dijck, are not fundamental for the set of internet activities, together “constituting the nucleus of power of the platforms to mediate infrastructures, users and social sectors” (Van Dijck, 2022, p. 28), we are only constituted of “atomized complementers whose existence “It is only vital if value is added to the platform” (Neto, Chiarini e Ribeiro, 2022). Understand here by adding value to the expansion of two so-called network effects. This part of our tree is where we will find the national platform companies, fulfilling (gladly) the role of peripheral capital, serving the large global project of resumption of North American hegemony, formulated in the wake of the Reagan government on a macroeconomic, political and military level, but completed, not concerning industrial policy, for the global information infrastructure project. Clinton governs. The insertion of national capital in this process was the result of the policy of two successive Brazilian governments that, on the contrary of the Chinese, did not have any concern with technological and cultural autonomy, as Furtado (1978) defended.
Not that it refers to the Brazilian health economy, however, the result seems to have been very different, thanks to the creation of SUS, the tradition of the health movement and the development of research in public health that will allow the country, for example, to present itself as an exemplary case of universal availability of the vaccine against covid-19, as well as the disastrous management of the pandemic by the Ministry of Health under the command of General Pazuelo. These conditions, the project of the Health Economic-Industrial Complex (CEIS) mentioned above, coordinated by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, may serve as inspiration. Assim, "the global dynamics of the vaccine industry is evidence of the social space where there is concretely a tense relationship between capitalist dynamics and the world of life. In light of the perspective of CEIS, as global asymmetries in the generation of knowledge and production associated with assimetria in the access of global population to two "vacinas reveal the configuration of a clear center-periphery relationship in the health area" (Gadelha, 2022, p 5). The visa project does not only respond to the immediate challenges of the health system, but, considering it as an industrial complex, which involves academic research on the subject, mechanical and chemical-based industries and capillary health services, based on a deep technological transition – which is directly related to the platform economy (Bolaño & Zangelini, 2023) –, take it as a central element of a national development project linked to the satisfaction of prementes social needs.
Nesse sense, the Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services was pressed in the reconstitution of the Grupo Executivo do Complexo Econômico-Industrial da Saúde (GECEIS), created in 2008 and deactivated by the Bolsonaro government, which followed the same perspective of the Temer government of neoliberalization of the health sector, which included the cessation of public information due to the creation of an open system open health, "a repository of assistance and health data of all Brazilians, collected from an electronic record; and a 'positive health record', with financial data on the beneficiaries of plans" (Fraga & Rocha, 2022). On the contrary, the relaunch of GECEIS, Minister Esther Dweck, promises to reinforce the power of the State as an inducer of innovation and productive development. It is this perspective that the regulation of platforms should also be thought about.
The tree metaphor represents a system in which the dice, like water and air, are collected and circulated in three segments as the whole develops. "As companies that operate several platforms on our three levels have greater operational power, strengthening their position at the core and developing and consolidating their power of control over the system (Van Dijk, 2022, p. 29). The owners of intermediary platforms, like the North American Big Five, occupy the position of greater power, reinforced by processes of vertical integration, intersectoralization, infrastructuralization and interdependence that makes the role of regulators difficult, because the joint regulation of two regulated entities consists, in the final analysis, of “concurrent coordinates”, forming a highly concentrated global oligopoly. Or, the national regulatory agents of peripheral countries, such as or Brazil, will face, These conditions, more than difficulties, a real blockage, which results in serious prejudice to sovereignty, to the extent that infrastructuralization means, in the last instance, that this intermediary sector, under the domain of foreign private agents, controls a public sector that should, in principle, do view of the regulation of competition, be offered directly by the State or by an incumbent company, subject to public service obligations.
But this situation, long an anomaly, is happening on a global level, with a major change, such as the case of China, which ended up placing digital platforms in the center of its vigorous and recently succeeded national development project, as part of a strategy of technological autonomy, which is also the condition of the main challenger to power. North American economic and industrial system. Without entering into the details of the Chinese case, it is worth mentioning only that, in 2019-2020, when the platforms of the country have already been reached, in the function of the previous stimulus policies, large proportions, placing themselves in the condition of powerful global competitors of the North American oligopoly, the government passed to adopt a approach “regulatory”, based on three elements. "First, the State restricts the financial services offered by the platforms. Next, it strengthens its antitrust agency and opens antitrust investigations in all large platform companies for anti-competitive behavior. Thirdly, the State expands its supervision over and controls data on the platforms."1 . Our opinion is that the State transitioned from the previous policy of stimulus and that we can call benign neglect to out of regulation of competition, aiming to avoid not only the concentrations of market power, but also the destabilizing potential of the national development policies that the vinham platforms acquire, including in relation to the state financial system. For example, in March 2021, President Xi Jinping declared that “all financial activities involving platform companies 'should be carried out under financial supervision'” (idem, citing Zhang, 2021).
Thus, economic regulation is subordinated to the development project and national interests. No Brazil, on the contrary, predominates now a liberal approach, which oils the monopolistic conditions of the big five North Americans, concentrating the regulatory debate around the content or, in the best of the hypotheses, gives regulation of two work processes in companies like Uber that, in passing, are nothing more than capitals outsiders that sugam para o exterior uma massa de mais-valia produced internally. It is thanks to the ownership of a technical platform for mediation of services that could be easily developed in the country, mobilizing national intelligence, small and medium-sized companies acting at the local level, cooperatives, prefectures, etc. The support and organization of this type of entrepreneurship and of the entire sector of the national platforms located in our branches of the Van Dijck tree involves regulatory policies, in the broadest sense of the term, linked to science, technology and innovation policies in the area of information and communication technologies.
But the decisive step in the direction of cultural autonomy, a key element for overcoming dependence, could only be achieved, in this case, not at the moment in national production, such as chinesa, atingisse or tree trunk. In this sense that you are responsible for regulation, alongside two managers of science and technology, you must direct your sociological and institutional creativity, mobilizing political culture, as defined by Furtado, according to the interpretation of Octavio Rodriguez (2009). It is, as should be clear, a long-range perspective – not even that it refers to national security, to defense against so-called hybrid wars and other issues that have animated the Brazilian political debate in recent years – that should be subordinated to a national project that the Brazilian bourgeoisie does not seem to have the capacity (or interest) to lead.
Complete article available in: https://outraspalavras.net/tecnologiaemdisputa/a-regulacao-das-plataformas-e-o-projeto-nacional/#sdfootnote1anc
[1] Coordinator of the CLACSO Working Group on the Political Economy of Information, Communication and Culture.
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1Original version: "First, the government curbed financial services provided by the platforms. Second, the government strengthened its antitrust agency and opened antitrust investigations into all the major platform companies for uncompetitive behavior. Third, the government increased its oversight of the platforms' control over data"
