The USA and China both have their own online platforms for mail/messaging, (social) media, business, commerce and cloud services. These services are run by Internet conglomerates such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft in the USA, and in China the Alibaba Group, Baidu and Tencent. Even Russia has its own conglomerates and platforms, e.g. the Mail.ru Group (which also owns ICQ, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte), Rambler and Yandex.
Despite their geo-economic differences, the underlying model for all of these services is similar: a highly centralised platform economy/ecosystem built as a walled garden, bringing together very large numbers of users, network effects,Rufus Pollock, founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) calls these 'platform effects' in his 2018 book 'The Open Revolution' (as discussed in section <7.1.17>). and surveillance capitalism or (state) mass surveillance.
Even though Europe has many platform companies, it lacks this type of large, powerful Internet conglomerate. European citizens and organisations have traditionally piggybacked on US-based platforms.
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