The Platform Economy After COVID-19: Regulation and the Precautionary Principle

Abstract

Online platforms are two-sided or multisided markets whose main function is matching different groups (of producers, consumers, users, advertisers, i.e., hosts and guest in Airbnb, audiences and advertised in Google, etc.) that might otherwise find it more difficult to interact and possibly transact. Some of the potential critical issues associated with the platform economy include the relationship between personhood (the quality and condition of being an individual person with protected sphere of privacy and intimacy) and personal data, on which the platform economy thrives by extracting behavioral surplus, scale to dominance and market power, and lockin for businesses. In this chapter, I first shortly review how the pandemic crisis has impacted the platform economy and what problems are being exacerbated. I then conclude and focus the core part of my analysis on the issue of regulation and particularly on the merits and limits of applying the precautionary principle when addressing the online platform economy.