Platform ecosystems, market hierarchies and the megacorp: The case of Reliance Jio

Abstract

The ‘great integration’ of disparate economic sectors by ‘Big Tech’ has been fuelled by the massive expansion of mobile infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and the systemic enclosure of users within multi-sided marketplaces operating under the euphemism of ‘platform ecosystems’. Taking the case study of India’s ‘national champion’ Reliance Jio, this article considers the ways in which India’s leading ‘corporate’ has deployed the ‘ecosystem’ blueprint and adopted the strategic role of the oligopolistic megacorp in India’s digital economy. It has done so, seemingly, without adopting the institutional form upon which Eichner’s founding proposition rests. Consequently, we argue that the separation of ownership and management as per the North American corporate form is not fundamental to the status, function or strategy of a conglomerate oligopoly. Rather, we propose that the megacorps of the digital age have an arisen as an inevitable consequence of market hierarchies in the digital economy, and that the key institutional factor in the consolidation of their market power is the licence of the state.

Dependency in the Digital Age? The Experience of Mercado Libre in Latin America

“…Simultaneously, in accordance with the literature on regional platform leaders (e.g. Athique and Kumar, 2022;Jin, 2017), we found that these algorithms are unavoidably intertwined with digital services that Mercado Libre cannot supply in-house and that are provided by US Big Tech companies. Structurally, the company depends on digital technologies, such as algorithms and computing power, provided as black box cloud services by Amazon and Google.…”

“…This private tech giant is controlled by an Indian oligarch linked to traditional sectors. However, it is dependent on its main technology provider, Microsoft Azure, and, after allotting equity shares, includes Meta and Google among its shareholders (Athique and Kumar, 2022). Likewise, Nowak (2023) observes that Grab and Gojek, two ride-hailing companies that are the largest digital platforms in Indonesia, follow a data extraction logic and rely on venture capital investments from, among others, Google and Uber.…”

A Critical Political Economy Perspective on Indian Television: STAR, Hotstar, and Live Sports Streaming

“…The key player in this campaign has been Reliance Jio, which began offering mobile subscribers free calls and Internet plans at a fraction of the market price. It has been argued that India's platform ecosystem has been shaped not so much by private enterprise as by the license of the Indian state (Athique and Kumar 2022). Jio's success has been marked by its facelift as a "national champion" under the state-capital relationship, which has fostered an "Indian Gilded Age" (Fitzgerald 2020), best manifested in the disruptive prowess of its predatory data plans (Mukherjee 2019).…”

Streaming and India's film-centred video culture: Linguistic and formal diversity

“… 4. The ambitions of Digital India are gargantuan, with multiple projects grouped under three core headings: ‘digital infrastructures’, ‘governance service’ and ‘digital empowerment’ (Government of India, 2018). Taken as a whole, the primary goal is to institute the datafication of banking, citizenship, health and agriculture for 1.3 billion people and then to optimize the value of those resources (Athique and Kumar, 2022). National aspirations at this scale require vast industrial investments in fibre and 5G networks, data centres, manufacturing, and power generation.…”

“…In pursuit of its flagship Digital India programme, the Government of India has fostered key partnerships, both with the Silicon Valley giants and with domestic businesses. By far the most significant of the latter is Reliance Industries Ltd, which has been quickly positioned as the critical player in the provision of national 5G networks and hailed as India’s very own national champion (Athique and Kumar, 2022).…”