The Fourth Industrial Revolution has resulted in the disappearance of a distinct division between what should be the domain of the state, market and civil sector. The key to understand the blurring of boundaries between sectors is, among other things, the development of digital platforms which create the so-called “two-way markets” where the platform owner, supplier and customer interact. The state regulatory policy does not keep pace with technological advancement.
Regulatory Policy and Big Players
Digitisation has caused Amazon and Ebay to turn shopping into a platform. Uber does the same with the taxi market and Airbnb – in the hospitality industry. Elsevier is changing from a publishing house into a knowledge platform, integrating the content of other publishers.
The above trends make it increasingly common for the government to actively participate in that process, both from the side of the stimulator of processes that foster social and economic development, but also from the side of the regulatory policy that will face large international corporations that gain an extraordinary market advantage over the small and medium enterprise sector.
However, the platformisation of society does not always lead directly to the creation of monopolies. The analysis of the above mentioned processes shows an unusual consistency – in many markets there is rather an even distribution of shares. Competitive platforms appear immediately when market participants consider existing platforms too restrictive. The success of Android, which is an alternative to Apple’s closed operating system for mobile phones, is a typical example of this.
Revolution 4.0 and State Action
As a consequence of technological development, for the purposes of modern regulatory policy, public authorities are forced to redefine in particular:
- the capacity of markets built around information technology to self-regulate in order to maintain the development capacity of the economy and in some situations even to replace certain functions of the state,
- the relationship between the functions of technology platforms in bilateral and multilateral markets, based on network effects, and traditional monopolies, taking into account the risk of destabilising the operation of existing companies resulting only in the emergence of new ‘monopolies’,
- the issues of privacy and the existence of a specific ‘currency’ in the virtual space, which may include personal data of IT service users. At the same time, in connection with the issue of multilateral platforms, attention must be paid to the question of the monetisation of the ‘new economy’ of consumer activity by companies.
- the issues related to the speed of technological advancement affecting IPR management regimes, in view of the inadequacy of traditional patent systems in building incentives for entrepreneurs in certain sectors (the problem of patent unreliability).
