Reports, debates, and calls for challenging the power of tech giants are common in business and daily press. Outrage over socially damaging practices is found across the public sphere with issues ranging from tax avoidance and anti-competitive behaviour to disinformation and hate speech distribution, privacy abuse, surveillance, and labour disputes. These regular signs of dissatisfaction put the political system on notice and create a sense of urgency for political action in the form of regulatory and policy responses. Despite widespread debates and clear indicators of their excessive power, very rarely do we encounter discussions as to what does it actually mean to hold a monopoly and what are the specific features of digital monopolies in the capitalist mode of production. Digital platforms as monopolies lead to a peculiar set of economic, political, and social configurations and consequences, whose negative tendencies remain to be adequately understood. In this book, we provide theoretical and empirical arguments for a better understanding of the character and consequences of digital monopoly platforms in contemporary capitalism.

Much of the existing research on digital platforms tries to follow the latest technological developments by providing entirely new theoretical concepts. It is, however, common that new concepts suffer a double fate. First, they become outdated when new products and services appear in radically new forms, when they take the shape of new technological forms and social forms of wealth. Techno-optimism surrounding so-called user-generated content on social media and its alleged democratization potential in the public sphere is one case in point. Second, over time they are often exposed for reducing the explanatory power of the conceptual apparatus they build on. Over time, it became clear that user-generated content is a way for social media companies to gather and process data, and ultimately to profit from platform usage and accumulate capital and wealth. We try to avoid both problems by sticking with the classical Marxian theoretical frameworks while preserving the methodological space for new concepts and theoretical insights. Focusing on profit making as the driving force of capitalist firms, we alter the existing concepts and theoretical insights only when we come across empirically observed entities that play a functionally important role in profit making, yet whose role is not understood clearly enough with existing concepts and theories.