Challenges to Democratic Rule-Making Authority and Legitimacy

Challenges to Democratic RuleMaking Authority and Legitimacy

Urban platforms have also disrupted existing power and legitimacy paradigms in cities, owing to the nature of platforms as rule-setting monopolies and as collectors and processors of vast quantities of urban data in ways that exceed state capabilities. As Sadowski and Pasquale describe, platform business models are uniquely premised on network effects and monopoly power making them “no longer market participants” but “market makers, able to exert regulatory control over the terms on which others can sell goods and services.”10 This sentiment is echoed and furthered by Soderstrom and Mermet who articulate the view that platforms’ monopolistic control of “code and data” position them as a rival to government rule-making authority:

…digital platforms, through their ubiquity and the control they have over code and data, produce a corporatism of governance in which platform companies are increasingly in control.11

Urban platforms then, in addition to their impacts and externalities, also challenge fundamental democratic notions of who decides and who makes the rules in cities. Who is in charge of directing traffic on city streets? Waze has greater ability to reach and route drivers12 than any detour sign installed by a department of public works or announcement from a transportation official. Who decides where neighborhoods are and what they are called? Google Maps can now rename and relabel neighborhoods with more authority than any planning department map or city council resolution (even if they get the spelling wrong)13. Who keeps track of how many people are in the city, how they move through it, and what points of interest they visit? Platform-captured location data can produce more accurate and up-to-date vehicle counts on city roads than the latest traffic

10 Sadowski, “Who Owns the Future City?”

11 Söderström and Mermet, “When Airbnb Sits in the Control Room: Platform Urbanism as Actually Existing Smart Urbanism in Reykjavík | Sustainable Cities.”

12 Lisa W. Foderaro, “Navigation Apps Are Turning Quiet Neighborhoods Into Traffic Nightmares,” The New

York Times, December 24, 2017, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/24/nyregion/trafficapps-gps-neighborhoods.html. 13 Jack Nicas, “As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume,” The New York Times, August 2, 2018, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-neighborhoodnames.html.

study commissioned by the municipal engineering department and clearer pictures of what commercial districts and businesses people visit than any economic development official. Who provides mass transportation? Transportation network platforms like Uber and Lyft explicitly compete for customers with public transportation and increasingly provide core services like paratransit14 .

To the fundamental question of Who makes the rules in the city? In some very real ways, “regulatory hacks” from companies like Uber and Airbnb have tacitly and explicitly asserted that private platforms have the ability to set rules previously set by democratically elected legislatures or publicly accountable officials, boards, or commissions—rules about where short-term rental businesses are allowed or how many for-hire vehicles should be deployed on a street or who is allowed to be a driver and what labor protections should apply to them. In these matters, the rules of digital platforms can be as relevant and authoritative as zoning laws or business licenses or taxi medallions or labor laws.

The Central Role of Platform Data

According to critical scholars like Soderstom and Mermet, the source of urban platform power is not merely the platform’s monopoly or rule-setting abilities, but its exclusive “control of code and data” beyond the capabilities of local government officials. This “datapower” they argue constitutes a technological and political advantage, allowing platforms to “reshuffl[e] the intermediation game ‘smartly’ bypassing the existing regulatory frameworks that have been crafted for the “physical” and not for the virtual world”. The result, as they describe it, is regulators helplessly looking on from the sidelines, unable to control or obtain the data they need to effectively officiate the playing field.15

14 “Expand Your Transit Services | Uber Transit,” Uber, accessed April 7, 2022, https://www.uber.com/us/en/ transit/.

15 Söderström and Mermet, “When Airbnb Sits in the Control Room: Platform Urbanism as Actually Existing Smart Urbanism in Reykjavík | Sustainable Cities.”

For Barns, too, data plays a central role in the political power of urban platforms. Citing Swyngedouw, she notes that “protocols and infrastructures of data governance also mean that platform governance not only exceeds but deliberately challenges and undermines the regulatory capacities of state actors.” To illustrate this point, Barnes points to Uber’s notorious “grayball” scandal in which regulators seeking to clamp down on illegal drivers in cities like Boston, Portland, Paris and Las Vegas were identified by the Uber app and in some cases deliberately served false data16. She further cites Airbnb’s limited willingness to share data needed by regulators, arguing that urban platform data has become a key asset and point of leverage in an ongoing power struggle.17

Data in other words is a medium of struggle and negotiation, used by platforms to undermine the regulatory competency of state-based institutions by both limiting external access and exceeding state-based data competencies.

Prominent officials in New York City have vocalized agreement with these scholars about the central importance of platform data in regulating public space and key markets. Former New York City Transportation Commissioner Janet Sadik-Kahn described ride hail platform data as “essential” and confessed that with respect to the management of streets during her tenure “because so many companies wouldn’t share the data, we were flying blind”. Similarly, in a short-term rental context, New York City Councilmember Corey Johnston, through a spokesman, expressed his frustration with the city’s inability to access platform data from a certain homestay platform for the purpose of understanding impacts on housing supply and rental costs “We’re in an affordable housing crisis. We’re in a homelessness crisis. And [Airbnb] will not give us this data.”18

16 “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide - The New York Times.”

17 Barns, “Re-Engineering the City.”

18 Gaby Del Valle, “A Federal Judge Blocked New York’s Latest Attempt to Crack down on Airbnb,” Vox, January 9, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/9/18174095/airbnb-lawsuit-new-york-city.

Platform Urbanism Sets the Stage for Data Mandates in Cities

This section’s review of existing scholarship and trends in smart urbanism and platform studies underscores the importance of platform urbanism to the emergence of the “actualized” smart city and demonstrates urban platforms’ increasing relevance in the everyday lives of city residents, workers, and visitors. Further examination and discussion with city officials reveal the impacts of the deployment of urban platforms as well as the central role of data in producing platform power and legitimacy— including as an asset to be leveraged and withheld to protect this power.

These preconditions lay the groundwork for the development of access to platform data as a key local government policy objective, and for the emergence of platform data sharing mandates as a novel, influential, and controversial regulatory approach.

In the next section I provide further detail on the development of access to platform data as a local government policy objective.