Abstract

Chapter 4 digs deeper into the strategies and practices of the leading digital corporations of the present age, focussing on Alphabet/Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent. Their function as ‘proprietary markets’ is identified as the heart of digital capitalism. The chapter begins with a more analytical perspective on the post-Second World War political economy, drawing on regulation theory and Wolfgang Streeck’s theory of democratic capitalism. The term ‘proprietary markets’ captures what sets the new digital accumulation regime apart from the Fordist and post-Fordist models that preceded it. While Fordism was about selling uniform mass products to unsaturated markets and post-Fordism shifted the focus to individualised products in more competitive markets, digital capitalism’s leading corporations have basically exited the competition game altogether by becoming the markets themselves. The chapter introduces a distinction between platforms per se and meta-platforms like Android or Amazon, which operate as markets for an ever-growing range of products and services. The latter’s strategies have ensured that it is almost impossible to access important markets without them. The chapter outlines how their expansion to date has relied on strategies such as ecosystem-building through mergers and acquisitions, and suggests that control of infrastructure will represent their main future growth strategy. This analysis is embedded in a theory of rent extraction: maintaining the digital infrastructures in question is often very cheap compared to the profits these companies extract from their position as owners of markets.