Section: Research Program

Economy of intermediation

The recent neologism uberization coined after the name of Uber, a young intermediation platform, may summarize the effects of the digital revolution. This revolution is impacting all sectors of our societies such as organizations, education, energy, transportation and health, to name a few. This revolution results in a serie of what Schumpeter calls creative destruction. As traditional sectors disappear, new ones are created. Our societies, which did not anticipate the depth of the changes, have to struggle to adapt to the pace of the development of the industry. Legal reforms in various important sectors including taxation are at stake. Some countries, more reactive than others, are clearly leading the changes, exploiting the benefits for businesses and the capacity to generate information and value, while others are trying to catch up with the global trends.

Data form the bricks of the information society, and their flows between users and services constitute the blood of the industry. We focus in DICE on the strategic role of data in this revolution, and in particular on the systems that harvest the data and concentrate it. In particular, we focus on intermediation platforms. Doing so, we investigate the issues they raise and the disruptions they entail.

We are especially interested in the global political impact of intermediation platforms. The settlement of the right to be forgotten in Europe, for instance, examplifies the new roles platforms are playing: they are both targets of complaints from institutions and mandatory partners in the governance of the world in the digital era. Indeed, they deeply revolutionize the relations between governments and citizens. If privacy is the focus of considerable attention, together with the state surveillance, in Europe in particular, it is only one aspect of the new knowledge made available. Social media produce considerable knowledge not only on individuals, but on populations as well, their economic fate, their political orientation, etc. On the other hand, open data from governments allow citizens to monitor the action of their governments, as well as to contribute to it. The digital revolution, with the capacity to access information in ways unthinkable in the recent past, modifies completely the balance of powers between citizens, states and corporations.

We investigate the digital world, and more precisely the power relations, from an interdisciplinary perspective. We simultaneously quantify power relations by studying data flows and the rise of intermediation platforms and produce an economical, political and ethical analysis of this new state of affairs. Namely, we show that areas such as the US or China dominate the digital world when others, such as Europe, do not succeed in proposing widely used intermediation platforms. This situation generates several conflicts between countries and companies and prevents weak countries from promoting their values and policies.

A new trend is emerging in the humanities, around in particular the digital studies, which promote the cooperation between computer scientists and specialists of social sciences. Among them, the Berkman center for Internet and Society in Harvard, the Medialab at MIT, or the Web Science Institute in the UK have gained strong visibility. They address positive as well as negative externalities of IT for societies, that is the new potentials offered as well as their risks. The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society in Berkeley also addresses fundamental political impacts on democracy, which can be enhanced by open data as well as another philosophy of political power as currently implemented in the State of California for instance. The Open Data Institute in the UK is also a leading center for political issues in Europe. France should catch up on these research trends, at the intersection of different scientific fields.