The corporate political activity of lean platforms in context

As discussed, the stories platform businesses tell about themselves, their users and their own corporate political activity creates confusion about their power, their relationship to neoliberal capitalism and the process by which they have grown. This chapter presents a contrasting perspective to these narratives, collecting and reviewing the empirical evidence of the conflicts and struggles that have accompanied processes of transformation, and identifying the common political processes and tactical approaches used. It shows that the form that platform businesses eventually take in any given context depends on interactions and conflicts between platforms, other businesses, lobbyists, states, investors, critical social movements, non-corporate platform alternatives, media, and the users and customers of platforms. These struggles are still ongoing and are at very different stages in different places.

A range of business tactics have been deployed to protect the legislative and fiscal advantages lean platforms hold over traditional hotels, taxi firms and other competitors. They include many forms that are recognisable from the extant literature on corporate political activity (for example, Katic and Hillman 2023), including private lobbying; lawsuits, appeals and legal threats; refusal to follow local laws; threats to leave a jurisdiction; withholding data required to enforce laws; incentivising law-breaking to prevent enforcement; offers of collaboration, negotiation and self-regulation; ‘business model adaptation’ involving linguistic and legal contortions to avoid their business falling under certain regulatory frameworks; ‘venue shifting’ to get local policies overturned by other authorities; framing and messaging tactics to shape public perception and influence law-makers; public relations (PR) strategies that involve the mobilisation of users or allies in order to shape public perception and influence law-makers, consultations or referenda; PR strategies to create mobilisation arrangements with allies; rapid expansion or ‘blitzscaling’, using heavy incentives to ensure popular buy-in from users (introductory offers for customers and drivers, hosts and other intermediaries); and delaying tactics – whether legal or relating to negotiation, which also allow the company to consolidate its position as a normal part of life and the economy in the society in question, making further disruption by the state less attractive a prospect.