7. Conclusions and Policies

It is possible to distinguish between market-conforming regulation and market-negating regulation (Lapavitsas, 2010). Curran et al. complement this with a state-negating regulation in order to protect digital spaces from state surveillance and control (Curran et al., 2016, p. 206), but they also conclude that “the idea that one can use the power of the state to enhance public provision, as opposed to government control, is hardly new” (Curran et al., 2016, p. 207).

The principle goes back to André Malraux, French Minister of Culture for the Popular Front in the 1930s.

Additionally, naming this tax—targeted at companies such as Google—after Vinton Cerf is to some extent polemical, not because of his undisputed and amazing contributions to the development of the Internet, but because of his role as a Google employee.

It should be noted that content from produsers is exploited in many different ways. Often these ways include chains of interdependence like in the vertically integrated uses of FOSS, by for example IBM intermediated by Red Hat in chains going back to the Fedora community, and to many other previously unpaid produsers’ programming activities around the Linux kernel. The exploitation could of course also be more direct as in the case of Facebook that is directly exploiting produsers of various forms of content on their own platform. A tax in this field not only focuses on the exploitation of living labor or unpaid activities in the case of Facebook, but also on the exploitation of historically unpaid living labor in IBM and Red Hat’s case.

A minor comment on intellectual property justifications: Individual ownership of data can also be justified from the Hegelian theory of personality, but not from a Lockean theory of labor (Hughes, 1988).

Different apps for managing personal data and intending to give consent and/or sell it have been developed. See for instance Yansen’s (2019) work on Wibson.

Curran et al. contend that data mining of big data should be used for “non-profit coordination of healthcare, transport, and public services”, and therefore support Morozov’s call for socializing the data centers, and criticize the use of datasets as a commodity to attract advertising (Curran et al., 2016, p. 207).

This is of course against so-called Net Neutrality. Neutrality, in a capitalist environment, is usually an ideological concept used to conceal the interests of those allegedly neutral actors. This is no exception and the net neutrality debate disguises the confrontation between capitalist services and content providers (such as Google or Netflix) and ISPs and owners of the infrastructure. While the latter demand price discrimination in order to charge more to huge companies, the former demand that every package is treated without discrimination, to equal their activities with those of an end user. Our position here is in favor of a radical neutrality, one in which the playing field is truly leveled.

The streaming service form of digital platforms like Netflix or Spotify has today substituted the P2P-file sharing of media content from platforms like The Pirate Bay. This strengthens a new form one-directional communication, or rather a relation in which a dominant party streams content in exchange for users’ attention (to advertisements) or for a fee, but also in exchange for the users’ data.

The architect behind the GPL, Richard Stallman, understands openness as being less important than rights and freedoms to act in common and in solidarity. Users should collectively control the program and what they can do with it: “Free software is software that respects users’ freedom and community” (Stallman, 2018, pp. 77–8). Actually GPL not only grants, but also requires that the freedoms or rights to access, reproduce, adapt and distribute the software (all being activities) are present in all derivative works (Stallman, n.d.). But, although GPL pits political liberalism’s favor of freedom of speech against economic liberalism’s need for private property enclosures, Stallman still moves very much within a liberal tradition that is critical of oligopoly capitalism, but not of smaller firms and enterprises (Stallman, 2018, p. 84). Even if Stallman stresses the building of commons and the fostering of solidarity, he stops short of developing a clear critique of capitalism’s anti-social logic. Competition between capitals will, regardless of the form capitalism takes, lead to capital concentration and centralization, in which smaller capitals are out-competed and co-opted by larger ones (Bottomore & Harris, 1991; Marx, 1867).

Moreover, although we support the idea of a reciprocal clause in general, we think that the suggested elaborations on a measurement system in relation to a reciprocal clause miss the point with a commons-based gift economy, and introduce a form of instrumental reason that is alien to such a gift economy (Said Vieira & De Filippi, 2014).

A license, from whichever party, is non-exclusive as long as it does not actively state the transfer of exclusive rights (Dodd, Lichter, & Reichman, 2019). Instead, content that is licensed by the copyright owner to someone in an exclusive manner, is effectively giving away the ownership of that content to the other party. After that is done, the original copyright holder has no control over the economic rights and cannot re-license the content in any way. That is what happens when you sign a traditional contract with a traditional book publisher, but also when you sign a contract with many Open Access Journals (OAJs). In the latter case, the choice of specific libre license (with specific CC license) is important. On the other hand, if the license is used together with a non-exclusive right, the receiving party cannot control either the copyright or the use of the entity that has been licensed to them. This also means that the original copyright holder, a lone programmer or the many commons-based peer-to-peer producers (if all are consenting) of the project, could re-license the content or software as they wish. This re-licensing would constitute a dual- or multi-licensing of software or cultural works, which forms one of the major loopholes connected to the GPL license.

Dual licensing creates a substantial loophole in relation to the standard GPL license, not only in relation to software but also in relation to cultural goods. Individual, institutional (companies and co-ops) and CBPP license holders can decide to issue a new proprietary license for the same work. In relation to companies based on CBPP-developed projects, this is often achieved by a CLA (Contributor License Agreement).

We agree with Stallman’s critique that Creative Commons only offers the copyleft alternative as one of many different options (Stallman, 2018, p. 79). Instead we would like to propose that co-ops, CBPPs and state-funded platforms use the PPL as the base for a new kind of license family, where the distinction between non-profit and for-profit actors along with copyleft are core units that are complemented by various voluntary options that can be added to the core.

But, what is a substantial contribution? It is hard to tell. From the literature (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014, 2015; Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014; P2P Foundation, 2018; Said Vieira & De Filippi, 2014) it is very unclear how large a for-profit company’s active contribution to a co-op or commons-based project will have to be in order to be valid as such, thus rendering it possible for it to exploit the co-op’s or CBPP’s work. Also, there seems to be no difference between the contributions by a for-profit company and the contribution of a co-op member, or a “true” commoner.

“But, beyond that, governments should pass laws saying that agreements of that nature are invalid—that they have no legal force in this jurisdiction, no matter where they were signed. This applies to non-negotiated contracts, where the terms are just imposed: ‘If you want this, agree to the contract’—there’s no chance to negotiate, and that’s the great abuse. It’s different when the parties actually talk about what terms they want; there may be no need to restrict those” (Stallman, 2018, p. 86).

How such alternatives could grow stronger in order to harness the value of the network effects is a crucial question. To successfully address this problem will involve cooperation and strategic alliances between co-ops, CBPPs and state agency-funded platforms. In the end there will have to be cooperation around collective or federated solutions, like in networks of both state-funded distributed institutional repositories of peer-reviewed scholarly articles (based on the OAI-PMH protocol) with a common search interface, and in networks of non-profit academic journals that Fuchs and Sandoval propose as an alternative to the Gold OA business model (Fuchs & Sandoval, 2013). But, in order to be successful, we cannot rely only on the state. The state under capitalism, characterized by citizens’ rights that potentially give the “subaltern classes control over legislative and executive powers” at the same time as the constitution backs the interests of private property (Jessop, 2018), needs support from trade unions, social movements and non-profit organizations, in order to have an increasingly progressive function. The partner state (Bauwens, Kostakis, & Pazaitis, 2019; Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014) will need to have someone to partner up with. Therefore, there is a need to incite and facilitate bottom-up, commons-based or cooperative projects that are increasingly networked and federated amongst themselves, and in relation to the state. Helping each other in federated networks could eventually lead to effective ways of harnessing network effects in non-profit forms. Very much like Wikipedia with all its language-versions is already experiencing.

The state’s support to platform projects should in turn, in our view, be characterized by the arm’s length principle that we discussed initially in this chapter. It should be directed toward prioritizing platform projects using one of the licenses in the Commoners’ License Family. Using one of the Commoners’ licenses safeguards, builds, and also has the potential to level the digital playing field in potentially expanding and flexible ways, popularizing the effective power to act that would expand social practices of doing in common, commoning, in-between and also beyond the state and the market (De Angelis, 2017). Strengthening society’s commons will in turn strengthen the state’s power to challenge (an effective right to act) neoliberalism.

Scholz enumerates three parts or principles of his proposal for Platform Cooperativism. Here we rearranged these principles to better reflect our perspective. Despite Scholz using the term “co-ops”, his examples, typologies and principles refer to a wider set of organizations than just cooperatives.

The Marxist critique of cooperatives is straightforward: either they survive by competing on the market, but then they tend to become capitalistic in character in the process, or they stick to their alternative visions, but then tend to fail in the competition on the market and dissolve sooner or later (Sandoval, 2016, pp. 98, 100–1). Sandoval (2016) points out that contemporary business discourse and older liberal discourse actually exceed this critique by advocating co-ops as a strategy to increase productivity and innovation within capitalism. And, in order to be political in the grander scheme of things they have to establish political goals on a societal level for the business (Sandoval, 2016, pp. 98, 100–1). “Radical politics are not inherent in the co-operative structure” (Sandoval, 2016, p. 102).

Scholz’s concept of platform co-ops exceeds our focus here in two respects. On the one hand, he describes co-ops as platforms which we would classify as CBPP (as “Produser-owned Platforms”) or state funded (“City-Owned Platform Cooperatives”). On the other hand, Scholz is engaged not only in finding alternatives to profit from openness business models but also and mainly to other kinds of platforms, such as Uber, Airbnb, Task Rabbit and so on (see Scholz, 2016). Certainly, we welcome this broad perspective, as we do think that it contributes to building a thriving sphere of digital commons.

It is also important to mention that even if in this study we reserve the term co-op for workers’ co-ops, consumer-driven co-ops have been around for more than 100 years. A consumer co-op is not the same thing as a user or produser cooperative as it is built around commercial activity, but the historic consumer co-ops with their more fluctuating memberships connect political ideas put forward within guild socialism’s and anarcho-syndicalism’s ideas about establishing federations of producer and consumer co-ops that synchronize their activities on a societal level (Lund, 2001; Wikipedia contributors, 2018). Future policies could discover further insights about how to scale up the produser-cooperative idea in progressive and democratic ways from these traditions.

More precisely, the former provide subtractable goods and services while the latter offer non-subtractable goods. Regarding these concepts, see the section on commons in Chap. 1.

To be sure, there are worker co-ops providing free software (such as Gcoop in Argentina), but they are not platform co-ops.

Bauwens et al. explain heterarchy as follows: “In CBPP some contributors may be paid/employed but all (in collaboration with groups and individuals that are not) produce commons. Hence, the work is not directed by corporate hierarchies, but through the mutual coordination mechanisms of the productive community. CBPP is based on open and transparent systems, in which everyone can see the signals of the work of others, and can, therefore, adapt to the needs of the system as a whole” (Bauwens et al., 2019, p. 12).

There are also other alternatives. The main one refers to institutional arrangements in which the state funds organizations placed outside it. For instance, Public Benefit Organization (PBO) or Public Good Organization is a narrower form of non-profit organization. PBOs provide specific services that often exclude partisan or political and lobbying organizations (Bolleyer, 2018). Such organizations could be publicly funded by the state, under the principle of arm’s length distance, to develop digital platforms of various sorts. Yet another kind of state-centered platform for commoning might refer to experiments with participatory budgeting. They constitute a direct-democracy approach to budgeting that could strengthen an inclusive and more horizontal governance, but could also be captured by interest groups in an unequal society (Shah, 2007, p. 1). Such projects could use digital platforms in new experimental ways through regional and neighborhood committees.

This development takes its influences from the USA, the doctrine of New Public Management, and the central banks’ independence in Europe, and the independent agencies are located in specific fields (like water, telecom and electricity) where they are thought to enhance the efficiency and quality of services to the citizens. As an example, the state in Latin America has changed its character since the 1990s because of these autonomous regulatory agencies (Bouckaert & Peters, 2004, p. 89; Levi-Faur & Jordana, 2006, pp. 335–6, 340).

Like in many examples, the borders between independent agencies, state-funded NGOs and CBPP are blurred. For instance, academic researchers acting as peers (in peer-review processes) remind us of a CBPP feature. However, in many cases these unremunerated activities are part of the duties that are measured and taken into account by the institution which pays the wages of teachers taking on the duties of peer reviewers.

Another version of the same problem regards the monitoring of how co-op members, wage laborers and produsers follow the regulations of for-profit uses, in case they are allowed.

Our policies regarding the alternative platforms’ monetary relations to the capitalist economy differ from other ways of financing alternative platforms. Spanish Goteo is here an instructive example to discuss. Goteo is a crowdfunding platform that works as a middle man, helping what they call commons-based projects to collect monetary gifts, or facilitating distributed voluntary contributions (microtasks, services or infrastructure-related) to them (Goteo, 2019c). “It is a tool for generating resources ‘drop by drop’ for a community of communities consisting of over 65,000 people, with a funding success rate over 70%” (Goteo, 2019a). This support is much needed for alternative platforms, but there are several crucial differences between the policies we propose and Goteo’s perspective.

First, Goteo fully accepts the unconditional possibility of “individual rewards” as long as the actions contribute to “generate a collective return through fomenting the commons” (Goteo, 2019c). This puts the focus on prosperous individuals rather than collectives. Second, this collective return refers to projects that are transferable and reusable not only under free licenses (like in free software), but also under open licenses (like open source software) (Goteo, 2019b). The project therefore to some extent supports the openness ideology that we critique and direct our policy suggestions against. Third, Goteo does not regulate for-profit uses of the commons’ resources by for-profit actors. Our proposed alternative co-ops, CBPPs and state agencies that use the Commoners’ License Family, could form the base for a new intermediary that gives a helping hand in building robust and collectively governed commons that prosper from the regulated collection and distribution of fees from for-profit uses of their resources that do not permit the enclosure of derivative works.

In projects that already depend on voluntary contributions of productive activities, a significant contribution from an outsider does not have to be distinguished from commoners’ contributions, if no profits are made and kept privately by the two. The outsider just becomes an insider. But, on the other hand, all commoners that are making substantial contributions, also get the commercial right to use the commons for for-profit uses.