4.2.1. Levelling the Playing Field for Platform Cooperatives

Digital technologies can help to create new and more democratic organisational forms for economic activity and for governing infrastructures. Very promising ideas and developments are ongoing in the movement for platform cooperatives where the aim is to make workers, users and other stakeholders the owners of platforms that coordinate economic activities, e.g. taxi drivers owning and operating their own digital platform to constrain the dominance of platform monopolies.

Effective taxation and regulation will pave the way for the development of platform co-operatives – models of economic exchange which are owned and governed by workers, users and other stakeholders and often have social and ethical objectives. Instead of trying to imitate Silicon Valley, the EU must strive to create a democratic and collaborative digital economy that has social justice and environmental justice hardwired into its structures.