(highlight:: The Platform Society: Why Online Infrastructure Should Be Governed Democratically
Summary:
The term 'The Platform Society' was coined to explain how various offline activities have shifted to an online environment, creating platform environments and spaces.
These platforms form part of global platform ecosystems, with American and Chinese ecosystems dominated by major tech companies. The American platform ecosystem, which is prevalent in Europe and the US, is constructed by large online platforms such as social media, app stores, and search engines, leading to an increasing dependency on this ecosystem.
The speaker argues that these ecosystems should be governed and controlled democratically, rather than being dominated by a few opaque and centralized tech companies.
They advocate for reorganizing and reflecting on the architecture of public online spaces, promoting principles such as open source, nonprofit governance, and community moderation.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The Platform Society still looked very differently than it looks now, but we basically coined the term because we wanted to explain how a lot of our offline activities like communication, Mobility, lots of other activities, how do you have been moved to an online environment, all our activities and services and even infrastructures are increasingly platformized As we call it. We are becoming platform environments, platform spaces and those platforms have all become part of a huge global platform ecosystems system and those actually there's two very big Ones. There's an American ecosystem of course where the platforms are controlled and organized by five big tech companies, of course Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft and There's a Chinese ecosystem of platforms that is dominated by three mainly big Chinese companies by do Alibaba and Tencent, we call it the acronym is the BET companies, but of course The Chinese ecosystem is controlled by the Chinese state. Now if we stick to the American platform ecosystem which is mostly what we inhabit in Europe and in the United States, what we're seeing is that very large online platforms such as social Media, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, but also TikTok, but also app stores, advertising services, pay systems, search of course, maps, clouds, lots of these platforms are actually Kind of together constructing that ecosystem and we've all very much become dependent on that ecosystem as such. So while platforms have come to govern societies and the way they are organized, I think that ecosystem need to be governed and controlled democratically rather than being governed By a few big companies that are not very transparent in terms of how they control it, how they moderate it and you know frankly I think it's very hard for just one global company to you know Globally moderate and control an online space for communication. If you have like three billion users, I think that is you know almost well almost impossible to control that and it's also undesirable to have that controlled by a centralized company That is fairly in transparent as far as its moderation and control is concerned. There is no such thing as a public online space that is governed in the Netherlands by a you know a public entity or that is governed even from the very principles for instance principles That I had heard to like open source like a nonprofit like you know the communication can be moderated by the communities themselves, decentralized, all those principles by design That I would like to advocate as part of that you know organizing the architecture of that public space. So you know in short in some we really need to reorganize but also we think first reflect on how that what that public space should look like.)
- Time 0:02:15
- democratic_decision-making, digital_infrastructure, participatory_democracy, public_goods, big_tech, internet_privatization, platform_society, decentralization, platformization, governance, public_spaces, digital_public_goods, internet, internet_infrastructure, privatization,

(highlight:: Platforms Need to Satisfy The Needs Different Groups Who Operate At Different Scales
Summary:
Decentralized online platforms aim to uphold public values such as safety, democratic control, and transparency.
These platforms are designed to cater to the specific needs of small public organizations, like public broadcasters, public libraries, and patient organizations. Each organization has unique needs and functionalities, with some serving small communities of 20-50 users, while others aim to reach thousands of people.
Large online platforms do not adequately meet the diverse needs of these organizations, hence the focus on customizing platforms to cater to their specific requirements.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
A decentralized open-source nonprofit online community a network that is really based on you know public values such as safety and democratic control and transparency and so that Is really the goal and you you call it very small online platforms it's really that it's not it's not big it's trying to service institutions public organizations in their own you know In their own size we're not you know wanting to depart from a centralized notion of platforms but from a decentralized notion of platforms we want to work on these on designing and governing A platform in in co-creation with public organizations such as the public broadcasters and public libraries for instance and we later on we also want to work with patient organizations Who have their own needs and we recognize that each of these public organizations has its own needs and wants its own functionalities some have very small communities that are already You know functional offline for instance take patients organizations they have we have a number of you know patient organizations that sometimes work with groups of 20 or 50 users And they are very heavily moderated by volunteers that are already involved in the offline community they have very different needs than for instance a public broadcaster who wants To organize an event after broadcasting a documentary and wants to reach at least 10 or 20 or 40 000 people which is a lot in the Netherlands but so you have very different needs that are Not currently not being served by the very large online platforms so what we're trying to do is understand the needs for different functionalities of those public organizations and Cater or customize you know the platform that we want to organize customize that towards their needs)
- Time 0:24:12
- product_requirements, scale, user_needs, centralization, decentralization, platform_society, platformization, product_market_fit, scale_of_cooperation,