antitrust by itself doesn't get to the root of the problem that these giant corporations present.

And I think also it doesn't alone point us in the direction of a more equitable,

democratic, and sustainable economy.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Matthew Lawrence and Thomas Hanna. Matthew Lawrence is the founder and director of Commonwealth,

a UK-based think tank designing models for ownership change. He's also the co-author of Planet on

Fire, a manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown, which will be released by Verso in April

2021, and you can find the information on how to pre-order it in the show notes. Thomas Hanna

is the research director at the Next System Project, and his work specializes in

alternative models of ownership.

He's also the author of Our Commonwealth, The Return of Public Ownership in the United States.

Together, they are the co-authors with Nils Peters of a new report called A Common Platform,

reimagining data and platforms. It not only goes through

the existing proposals to transform the platforms that we are so dependent on today to ensure that

they better serve the public good, instead of just serving the bottom lines of major corporations

and the power of the executives and CEOs of these companies, but also lays

out a number of policy options that could be pursued in order to build a new platform ecosystem

for platforms and technologies that are designed first and foremost for the public good, instead of

having to worry about or consider the incentives of a private corporation.

It's a really refreshing report. And in our conversation, we take the debate around platforms and what to do with them beyond antitrust. So we're not just worried about creating more

competitive markets for platforms or ensuring that there's more competition, but actually

changing the larger incentives that

exist around them to ensure that we no longer have platforms that are putting profits first and

...