Post-Privatisation and Corporate Political Responsibility: Negotiation of Rights and Duties in the Platform Economy

In this chapter, I take issue with the political role that digital capitalists play in the lives of citizens. The focus of the essay is the tendency of large online platforms to cannibalise the very role of governments in providing social infrastructure and access to fundamental rights. To conceptualise this occurrence, I coined the concept of post-privatisation; the concept is built by weaving together a number of common features that stand out when examining accounts of increased involvement of companies in active political action. In this chapter, I describe the distinctive traits that characterise post-privatisations. While, in principle, the process of post-privatisation does not regard only digital platforms, these latter, I suggest, instantiate the most advanced form of post-privatisation and crystallise the traits that are essential to explain the phenomenon.