Divergent social contracts
Technology platforms are today’s basic infrastructure, increasingly inseparable from the economies and societies in which they exist. These platforms are increasingly where citizens get news, engage in political debate, network professionally, and more.
But while tech companies might seek to create seamless, integrated global platforms, they in fact deliver their offerings in vastly different societies. The social contract of the US is fundamentally different from that of China, Saudi Arabia, or even the European Union (EU). So, governments and regulators in different markets have been moving to recast tech platforms in the image of their social contracts. An early example was China, which developed its own platforms that better align with its social contract than do US-developed offerings.
Meanwhile, the EU has become increasingly active and visible in regulating technology. The most prominent recent example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is a precursor of things to come. The GDPR tackles privacy and data protection, but much bigger regulatory issues loom, from the explainability of algorithms to the safety of autonomous vehicles. As these technologies come of age and become more prominent in the lives of citizens, expect governments in different regions to become more active in regulating them. Over time, increasingly complex regulatory issues and divergent ideologies will create either separate platforms, or platforms that ostensibly have the same name but deliver fundamentally different user experiences in different geographies.
Walled gardens
Regulators aren’t the only ones fragmenting the digital world. To a large extent, tech companies have been doing it themselves. Walled gardens – closed, self-contained tech platforms or ecosystems – have endured because they are good for the bottom line. They allow companies to extract more value from customers and their data while offering a more curated user experience. In recent months, we’ve seen a growing fragmentation of “over-the-top” media streaming services, with individual studios and networks developing their own subscriber platforms. Instead of streaming platforms that hosted content from a wide variety of creators, platforms will offer exclusive access to their own content — fragmenting the streaming media experience.