Political economy and legal support for digital platforms: Cooperation and conflict
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu25.2025.108Abstract
The article examines the phenomenon of the establishment and development of digital platforms as an emerging space of cooperation and competition between private business and public administration structures, primarily in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region, and legal support of this process. The authors identify two approaches to defining “digital platforms”: functional and political-economic. Within the first, the object of study is the economic, social and political interactions arising because of the digital transformation of various sectors of the economy. The second, political-economic approach, as the object of study, defines the space of interaction between government and business, within which information and communication technologies at the disposal of government structures and/ or national business are used to ensure technological sovereignty and protect the economic interests of an individual state or interstate integration association. In the modern era and for a fairly long historical perspective, only sovereign states and their governance structures are capable of providing the necessary conditions for solving the problems of creating and developing digital platforms. They not only have resources that private businesses often do not have to achieve these goals. Governments have the legal authority to act in high technology in the best interests of national security, as well as the power of the entire government machinery to achieve its goal even in the face of opposition or outright opposition. The formation of an international system of digital platforms is impossible without the clearly expressed political will of sovereign states. Their community is characterized by a hierarchical structure, while individual countries, recognized as sovereign by international law, do not have the right to veto global projects, which include the ICT industry that permeates the entire global economy and the digital platforms that form it “from the bottom up”. The three largest modern digital platforms (European, American and Chinese) are built on different political and legal foundations, so their interaction is a combination of cooperation and conflict. The first prevails when the three platforms discussed below complement each other and are used to build mutually beneficial value chains. And conflicts arise when these platforms come into direct conflict due to the promotion of their own unique technologies, as well as when dividing markets in other parts of the planet.
Keywords:
digital platform, ICT industry, new normal, intellectual property, personal data
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