5. Improving the Digital Platform Economy: Policy Suggestions

Facilitating digital and entrepreneurship ecosystems is high on many government policy agendas. Many nations focus on developing the digital infrastructure, maintaining digital freedom and privacy, protecting users from cybercrime and piracy, improving the population’s digital literacy, and supporting technology-related startups. However, enhancement of digital platform economies at the country level has been fragmented. Unfortunately, there is little understanding of how policies can foster this new type of economy most effectively. Some policies, such as the European Union Global Data Protection Regulation, have in fact had a negative effect on some information-sensitive business models (Hoofnagle et al., 2019). Those who want to regulate the digital platform ecosystem have to acknowledge that the most important platform companies are global and therefore call for global rather than local action. To highlight this, we report two interesting statistics.