Where Uber and Amazon rule: welcome to the world of the platform
by Evgeny Morozov from Technology | The Guardian on (#AJW0)
Powerful tech firms are altering not just the way we buy things, but could sweep away an entire economic model
Hardly a day goes by without some tech company proclaiming that it wants to reinvent itself as a platform. Back in March, when South Korea banned Uber, the company promised to let local taxi drivers use its platform - along with its matching services.
Facebook pulled a similar trick in early May: having run into trouble with its pseudo-humanitarian effort to provide free internet access via a project called internet.org, it, too, promised to turn it into a platform. Now, internet.org users, most of them in the developing world, could also enjoy free access to apps other than those developed by Facebook.
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