Alongside their dominance in international standards stetting bodies, US platforms also dominate private, de facto standard setting (Giblin and Doctorow, 2022). A core component ofthe platform business model is to anchor de facto standards (such as operating systems or app stores) within technology stacks (Müller et al., 2011). For instance, feature phone internet access across much of the African continent is dominated by Facebook’s Free Basics internet service (banned by India, however, on the grounds of its violation of net neutrality). And Google, through its Google Station program, has embedded itselfin technology stacks throughout the Global South by rolling out free Wi-Fi at over 5000 locations worldwide (Oyedemi, 2021). Similarly, the AI chip designer NVIDIA designed its platform and code library to only interoperate with its GPU semiconductors, making access indispensable for cutting-edge AI applications (including in China, which is striving to develop a fully autonomous AI industry) (Cusumano, 2023). Such approaches accord with Hart and Kim’s (2002, 1) definition of Wintelism as ‘strategies for controlling architectural standards in a horizontally segmented industry’.
China is often accused oftrying to develop a ‘splinternet’ by undermining the mixture of standards and protocols that underpin the open internet (Kenyon, 2021). Huawei’s development of a ‘new $\mathrm { I P } ^ { \prime }$ (a centralized and de-anonymized alternative to TCP/IP, so far rejected at various SDOs) is a prominent example mobilized by critics (Campanella and Haigh, 2023). But the example is often used misleadingly. China is indeed developing an increasingly comprehensive strategy to counter US state-platform power by challenging its chokehold over internet standardization. But rather than trying to fragment this fundamental architecture (Nanni, 2021), China’s strategy is to achieve commercial dominance by becoming a global standards-setting power through technological innovation (Yoo and Mueller, 2024). If successful, its platforms will construct powerful international ecosystems of their own without the need to instantiate ‘walled gardens’ at the network layer.
State Platform Capitalism
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