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The platform economy1See generally Martin Kenney & John Zysman, The Rise of the Platform Economy, 32 Issues in Sci. & Tech. 61 (2016); Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne & Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You (2016). is facing a crisis of accountability. Large Internet platforms, once regarded as sources of hope for democratic social movements or engines of a promising new economy—or, at worst, just superficial distractions—are now facing serious public scrutiny across the globe. The executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been called before the U.S. Congress to account for their roles in enabling foreign election interference. Scholars have raised concerns about algorithmic, data-driven business models,2Balkin alludes to this in the social media context as social media’s “grand bargain”—free communication technology in exchange for user data and loyalty—but such trade-offs can be seen in the gig economy as well (e.g., with respect to workers’ rights). See Jack M. Balkin, Fixing Social Media’s Grand Bargain (Hoover Institution, Aegis Series Paper No. 1814, 2018) https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/balkin_webreadypdf.pdf [https://perma.cc/8UBR-YXA6]. See generally, Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism (2019); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018); Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015). the exploitation of digital labor,3See generally Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (2017); Juliet B. Schor, Does the Sharing Economy Increase Inequality Within the Eighty Percent?: Findings From a Qualitative Study of Platform Providers, 10 Cambridge J. Regions, Econ. & Soc’y 263 (2017). the abuse of market power,4See Lina M. Khan, Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, 126 Yale L.J. 710 (2017); Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age 133 (2018); Carl Shapiro, Protecting Competition in the American Economy: Merger Control, Tech Titans, Labor Markets, 33 J. Econ. Persp. 69, 70, 75-76, 80-86 (2019) (arguing for the need for skepticism about horizontal mergers involving “superstar” firms given the growing body of evidence that the largest U.S. firms have increasing market power, while conceding that the narrow interpretation of U.S. antitrust laws in recent years diminishes the likelihood of successful antitrust enforcement against “tech titans” unless a particularly strong case emerges against them). corporate governance failures,5See David Larcker & Brian Tayan, Governance Gone Wild: Epic Misbehavior at Uber Technologies (Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, Closer Look Series: Topics, Issues and Controversies in Corporate Governance, No. CGRP-70; Stanford University Graduate School of Business Research, Paper No. 18-3, 2017), http://ssrn.com/abstract=3087371 [https://perma.cc/F7LB-NG2G]; Robinson Meyer, Twitter’s Famous Racist Problem, The Atlantic (Jul. 21, 2016), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/twitter-swings-the-mighty-ban-hammer/492209/ [https://perma.cc/6GHS-UMNY].  manipulation by oppressive governments,6See generally Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017). opacity and arbitrariness in content moderation,7See, e.g., Thomas E. Kadri & Kate Klonick, Facebook v. Sullivan: Public Figures and Newsworthiness in Online Speech, 93 S. Calif. L. Rev. 37, 90-91 (2019). and corporate surveillance,8See generally Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). to name just a few in an ever-growing body of literature on the depredations of the platform economy.

Part of the urgency surrounding such concerns lies in the fact that some platforms are near-impossible to escape. Internet users, and societies as a whole, have difficulty opting out of their services.9Erin Bernstein & Theresa J. Lee, Where the Consumer is the Commodity: The Difficulty with the Current Definition of Commercial Speech, 2013 Mich. St. L. Rev. 39, 40 (2014) (“Companies like Facebook . . . and Twitter offer services used by billions of users that have become central to our day-to-day lives.”). Companies like Facebook, for instance, track users across the Web and create shadow user profiles even when the user does not have an account on their platforms.10Beverley Skeggs & Simon Yuill, Capital Experimentation with Person/a Formation: How Facebook’s Monetization Refigures the Relationship Between Property, Personhood and Protest, 19 Info., Commc’n. & Soc’y. 380, 382 (2016). Not using such platforms means forgoing essential opportunities for work and social life—even access to basic services.11See generally Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018). By not using social media platforms such as Facebook, people deprive themselves of one of the “most powerful mechanisms” to make their voices heard.12Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017). Conversely, for those who use such services, exit is not a costless exercise, as it involves the irrecoverable loss of social capital, reputational cachet, and assets.13See, e.g., Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 290 (2006) (“[I]t may be harder to change communities in cyberspace than it is in real space. It is harder because you must give up everything in a move from one cyber-community to another, whereas in real space you can bring much of it with you.”).

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