Self-Regulating Platforms and Antitrust Justice

Digital platforms such as Amazon Marketplace or Google Search are commercial and political actors. They have taken center-stage as new spaces for exchange. They facilitate digitally networked interactions and transactions between different customer groups through algorithms, data, and other infrastructural affordances. At the same time, platform gatekeepers are political entities that engage in lobbying and that curate platform infrastructures as political and cultural spaces for participation. Platform companies thrive through laws and political choices that make their successful existence possible. Against the backdrop of Chicago School antitrust legal methods, which for some time have construed “markets” as separate from “politics” and platforms as efficient purely commercial spaces, this Essay argues that platforms’ hybrid economic and political status represents an opportunity to bridge the imaginary market-politics divide and to view digital market processes as inherently political processes. Today, we live in an era dominated by the self-regulating platform market: a space that is considered autonomous, inherently efficient, and hardly regul-able. Moreover, it is a space that justifies distributive asymmetries and concentrations of commercial power at unprecedented scale. Notwithstanding popular beliefs, the separateness of platforms from politics and law is more imagined than real. The essay looks at the specific ways in which antitrust law has interacted with digital platforms, shaping and interpreting these spaces as ‘self-regulating’ marketplaces. In so doing, I show that the purported neutrality of Chicago School antitrust, in particular the emphasis on consumer welfare maximization and efficiency, actively contributes to the erosion of social and collective values in these spaces. I argue that embedding the values of equality and reciprocity in the structure of digital markets and re-imagining platform environments as more openly political is not only possible but urgent in the context of the increasing privatization of digital life