There probably need to be laws that you can't be both a platform and compete against those on your platform with your own products/content. And make sure to close the "we'll just ban our competition from the platform then!" loophole.
It seems inevitable that once a platform, whether it's an ISP, a media platform, or an ecommerce platform, starts making its own products for that platform, then they will also start abusing their power against their own platform partners.
It's just irresistible for them not to, because there's so much to gain from it. So only (pro-active) laws could stop this. You can't leave it "to the market" to solve this, because by the time that happens (if ever), the platform company would have already extracted tens and hundreds of billions of dollars from the strategy and killed an untold number of smaller companies.
> You can't leave it "to the market" to solve this, because by the time that happens (if ever), the platform company would have already extracted tens and hundreds of billions of dollars from the strategy and killed an untold number of smaller companies.
... and by the time most users would jump to another platform, that other platform would start pulling the same thing, because why not? Ad infinitum.
It seems inevitable that once a platform, whether it's an ISP, a media platform, or an ecommerce platform, starts making its own products for that platform, then they will also start abusing their power against their own platform partners.
It's just irresistible for them not to, because there's so much to gain from it. So only (pro-active) laws could stop this. You can't leave it "to the market" to solve this, because by the time that happens (if ever), the platform company would have already extracted tens and hundreds of billions of dollars from the strategy and killed an untold number of smaller companies.