[PAPER PUBLICATION] A typology of platform power and its regulation

20 June 2025 By

Inge Graef and Friso Bostoen, INCA researchers from the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society have recently published a paper entitled “A typology of platform power and its regulation” in the journal Information, Communication & Society.

The article proposes an overarching typology of platform power consisting of three forms of control that can be distinguished from a legal and policy perspective:

  1. Power over markets: the impact of platforms on competition and innovation.
  2. Power over individuals: the impact of platforms on the interests of workers, business users and consumers.
  3. Power over society: the impact of platforms on politics and opinion formation, and to their presence in an increasing range of spheres of our lives, including domains such as health and education that used to be dominated by public actors.

Based on this three-fold characterisation, the researchers analyse to what extent the EU regulatory framework is capable of controlling platform power, and they conclude that despite the various legislative instruments adopted in recent years, there are still gaps. These gaps are both institutional (resulting from lengthy and complex enforcement procedures) and substantive (relatively limited attention to platform power over society).

To address these gaps, the research indicates that one approach could be to adopt new legislative instruments that target platform power. The paper acknowledges that this strategy could provide additional necessary protections. However, the authors caution that this measure might complicate the overall EU regulatory framework due to the increasing overlap of definitions, rules, and enforcement mechanisms. As a result, they propose an alternative approach: consolidating protections. This could be achieved either substantively (by bundling the relevant rules for platforms and creating a more focused regulatory framework tailored to the power of platforms) and/or institutionally (by giving enforcement powers over platforms to a single regulatory authority).

Regardless of the regulatory route taken in the EU, the INCA researchers’ three-fold characterization of platform power over markets, individuals, and society may help to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the different ways in which platforms impact EU values and to weigh the benefits of the activities of platforms against possible harms.