Platform capitalism is an economic and business model in which digital platforms play a central role in facilitating interactions, transactions, and services between different user groups, typically consumers and producers.
This model of capitalism has emerged and expanded with the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, transforming various sectors of the economy from retail and transportation to media and labor markets.
[5][6] Platform capitalism has been both praised for its innovation, user empowerment and market efficiency[7] and criticized for its potential for exploitation, market concentration, algorithmic bias and privacy concerns[8][9] by various authors.
[10] Technology companies build platforms that entire industries rely on, and those industries can easily collapse due to the decisions of those technology companies.
In turn, projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives.