In Barcelona, the rise of these platforms is associated by some residents with a sharp increase in rents, which has led some to begin to mobilise to defend themselves against the changes in their neighbourhoods. In addition, the city council has halted the granting of licences for tourist apartments. Is this something we will see in other countries?
I believe these movements make sense in a society because cities are losing their ability to control where people live. This power is beginning to transfer into the hands of big companies based in Silicon Valley, which are barely regulated and do not belong to any country or city even though they operate there. Consequently, they don’t abide by the same laws or share the same interests that you might have as a resident of Barcelona. I believe we need to be much more mindful of the public space that we are ceding to these platforms.
We need to reconnect with public values. And that is something that has started to happen in recent years. Amsterdam City Council has already implemented a number of measures: for instance, it has reduced the time that an owner can rent out their apartment through online platforms from 60 to 30 days. And it wants to cut that to ten days in areas in the city centre, where almost all the available accommodation belongs to Airbnb. And, in contrast, to extend it to 60 days or more on the outskirts, where the density is lower.
So, there is a need to negotiate with these platforms to defend the public space and all the people that use it. But before that, we need to stipulate what our public values are and what rights we as citizens want to defend.
Yet this attempt to regulate the sector is not without criticism, especially in countries like Spain, where tourism is a very important industry.
Yes, tourism is a major source of revenue. There are citizens who make a living renting out their home on Airbnb. But it’s a source of problems for others, who have to put up with the consequences of mass tourism or watch as rent levels in their neighbourhood spiral. We need to address all these consequences as a community.
With all due respect, Airbnb is an excellent platform in what it does, but it is not regulated. It has no interest in communities. It’s only interested in profit, just like all the other platforms. And it is precisely this negotiation of public values that most interests me. How have we allowed these platforms to take root in our society without considering what it is that we as citizens need to protect in terms of the public values of a democratic society?
The negotiation tables will have to include representatives of every group of stakeholders, without which these companies cannot operate…
Each situation is different. There are various levels of negotiation and they are all important. Let’s look first at bodies like schools, for example. Schools need to negotiate on the way they will allow platforms to enter the education system. At an institutional level, we need to decide whether or not we will allow Google into classrooms. Do we want pupils to use services like Google Docs? That’s an important decision because issues such as privacy come into play.
Then there’s the local level: cities like Barcelona or Amsterdam need to negotiate directly with platforms like Uber and Airbnb.
After that comes the national level. Countries are forced to negotiate all the time with these platforms because they act as suppliers of part of the national infrastructure. Let’s look at national broadcasting systems, for example. Public television channels used to be limited to the national or regional sphere, but now Google, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms have also been gradually appropriating this public space.
And at an international or supranational level, Europe has a very important role to play, as it ought to create a counterforce to square up to this global power emerging from Silicon Valley.
Something like this has already been done with the European General Data Protection Regulation. Firstly, attempts were made to regulate data protection from a solely national standpoint, but we then found ourselves with an amalgam of national privacy policies, as a result of which it made more sense to have a common European regulation like the one that came into force this year.
So, we need to understand how we can negotiate at each of these levels with these platforms.
Do you think that political leaders and lawmakers take into account the recommendations made by academic bodies and universities like yours?
Yes, increasingly so. No-one really thought about the issue prior to 2016. But 2017 was the year everything changed, particularly as a result of the scandal regarding Facebook’s responsibility in leaking information that supposedly affected the outcome of the elections in the United States. I fear that at that point our political masters began to panic a bit. They have come to realise that these platforms are changing the very fabric of our democracy.
In recent months, the heads of various government departments have begun to ask for my help and advice. How can we negotiate with platforms? How can we make public values the priority? How can we offer different solutions? These questions are coming up more and more often. So, I’m optimistic and I believe that governments and regulators are grasping the need to negotiate with these platforms.
Lastly, do you think that this evolution towards the ‘platform society’ has contributed to widening or narrowing the digital divide, in particular in relation to people at risk of social exclusion, who often have no access to new technologies or don’t know how to use them?
The digital divide is growing because of the rising power of the five big companies. Plus, it’s a divide that is increasing at various levels. Firstly, the inequalities between people who use the new technologies and those who have no access to them are becoming more pronounced.
But a technological divide is also developing. These platforms are growing ever more sophisticated. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand how they work because technologies like artificial intelligence, complex algorithms and the like are being introduced. They’re extremely complicated systems. Only a few very well informed people with special technological skills know how they operate.
Understanding Facebook or Google algorithms, which basically determine which news you get to see, has become a kind of privilege in our society. This huge knowledge divide between the people who have the power to distribute content – and to determine what we see first and what we never see under any circumstances – and everyone else, who is merely in the position of accepting what they see, seems very worrying to me.
That’s how they get us to swallow so much fake news…
The debate about ‘hate speech’ and ‘fake news’ is extremely important. Fake news isn’t something simply made up somewhere that we see by chance. There’s a whole targeted distribution network that decides what we get and what we don’t. And that power is controlled by a handful of major platforms whose operations are increasingly difficult to understand.
In short, there is a knowledge divide that has led to a power divide. And that is something that we absolutely must address.

The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World
José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal
Oxford University Press (2018)
Interview by Manuel García Campos