The Platform Delusion - Columbia Business School's Jonathan A. Knee Interview

Nick and I welcome Jonathan A. Knee onto the show, author of The Platform Delusion: Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans. Knee is Professor of Professional Practice and Co-Director of the Media and Technology Program at Columbia Business School and also a Senior Advisor at Evercore Partners.  

At a quick glance, The Platform Delusion appears to stand in opposition to Nick and I's book, Modern Monopolies. Tim Wu describes Jonathan's new book as "a jolting and often hilarious exposure of our delusions that teaches, once again, that the fundamentals of business may not have changed quite as much as you think they have." When we really dig down into Knee's "Core Tenets of the Platform Delusion" and discuss why platforms like Amazon and Google have become so dominant, we find a lot more alignment between Modern Monopolies and The Platform Delusion than one would initially think.  

One area we differ on is whether or not big tech companies are monopolies. We've often criticized U.S. antitrust regulator's focus on consumers while big tech runs rampant taking advantage of producers on platforms e.g. Amazon third-party sellers. For more on this topic, see our recent video on the FTC reshaping its anti competition arguments to take monopsony power into account.  

See more 👀 of our interviews with founders, economists, scholars, and business mavens on this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... 

00:00 - Subscribe and Fight Big Tech
00:55 - Modern Monopolies vs The Platform Delusion
02:05 - The misuse of the word platform
05:48 - Do all platforms have network effects?
11:36 - What variables drive a successful platform?
20:17 - Netflix has no network effects
21:26 - Why does everyone claim to be a platform?
25:24 - Amazon not a monopoly?
29:21 - Does Amazon have a monopoly over third party sellers AKA producers?
33:31 - Should antitrust law consider sellers as a customer to Amazon?
42:36 - Are antitrust regulators approaching this correctly?
45:01 - Big tech taking advantage of suppliers
49:04 - Big tech platforms as utilities
56:02 - Tech censorship
57:57 - Thanks for watching. 

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