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Cost of Exclusion, a New Measure of Platform Dominance
One of the fundamental elements in the formation of the modern information economy is digital platforms. The end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century are characterized by a platform revolution (Choudary et al., 2016). A digital platform generally refers to a space which provides the basis of services on the Internet. Companies that provide digital platform services are called digital platformers. Typical of these are the gigantic IT companies such as Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), and Apple (collectively known as GAFA) in the United States, or Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT) in China. On 1 March 2021, Yahoo Japan Corporation and LINE Corporation were merged into Z Holdings Corporation, which is referred to as the coming of a “Japanese GAFA” company (Nakashima, 2022). Other platform companies are also world-famous: Uber, Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, etc. There is a versatile penetration of platforms into all aspects of the activity of each person, which is related to work, life, and leisure. According to the MIT Sloan School of Management, as early as 2013, 14 of the top 30 global brands by market capitalization were subplatform companies already established and now dominating the arena that buyers, sellers, and a host of third parties connect to in “real-time mode” (Schwab, 2016). Recently, this trend has only intensified. Thus, the strengthening of the role of digital platforms on a global scale—turning them into a socially significant good and at the same time an influential economic and social force that dominates the national, regional, or even global market—forms the problem of access to these platforms by the population; in other words, there is a problem of inclusion or exclusion from them (exclusion), and therefore a problem its significance and cost both for society as a whole and for the individual.