The phenomena linked to digital platforms are rapidly crossing the boundaries of single businesses and are beginning to become relevant to the dynamics of markets, global economies and, ultimately, to the social and political dynamics of our planet. Those same technologies that promised to make business more democratic by allowing small producers to access the global market or by enabling interesting and virtuous phenomena such as the sharing economy, are now threatening to make the world an oligopoly. A solution typically called winner-takes-all is taking shape in which a small number of "hub companies" - including Alibaba, Alphabet / Google, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, Microsoft and Tencent - occupy the central positions. Undoubtedly, these companies create real and effective value for customers, but on the other hand they capture a (maybe) too huge and ever-growing share of this value. To focus our attention on these dynamics are not only consumer associations and scholars, but also very liberal institutions such as Harvard Business School. Iansiti and Lakhani already in 2017 introduced the concepts of HUB company and Domino effect. There are two laws that are normally used to explain the emergence and rapid proliferation of platforms like Amazon or Alibaba. In the Moore's law (according to which computer processing power doubles approximately every two years) and Metcalfe's law (according to which the value of a network increases with the number of nodes (direct and indirect network externalities)) On the other hand, however, the lesser known Albert-László-Barabási-effect makes it possible to predict that the evolution of the digital network will naturally lead to the emergence of positive feedback loops that create increasingly large, important, and highly hyper-connected hubs. Once a hub is highly connected in one sector of the economy (such as mobile telecommunications), it will enjoy a crucial advantage when it starts connecting in other sectors (automobiles, for example) creating a kind of digital domino effect that will most likely lead towards an oligopoly. Consider, for example, the cell phone industry. Until a few years ago, competition was based on hardware and software systems. There were no significant network effects: a Blackberry could interact with a Palm pilot. The result was the contemporary presence of dozens of competitors including Motorola, Nokia, Eriksson and Blackberry. With the introduction of ios and Android, the centrality of hardware was quickly lost. Platforms enable the fruition of different apps and services, and each new APP increases the value of the platform for the end user to the point of rapidly creating barriers to entry unbreakable for anyone. Google and Apple, and no more traditional telecom companies, now dominate a market they didn't even operate-in a few years ago; and capture the vast majority of its value; leaving APPs and service developers a minor share of the pie. Hub companies are creating a new, non-conventional way to compete. They don't win on the market because they invest on the development of new products with better functionalities or lower prices. On the contrary they enter other industries exploiting impressive network factors previously generated and transforming the competition from PRODUCT-driven to NETWORK-driven. A great example of this is Alibaba's Ant; a Financial spin-off that doesn't simply offer better payment services, better credit cards or even better investment management services; it relies on data from Alibaba's huge user database to turn traditional financial services into commodities and reorganize a good chunk of China's financial sector. The service in its first three years of life has conquered more than half a billion users and developed expansion plans well beyond the Chinese borders landing in India, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Companies operating in traditional sectors, that are not yet network-driven, may seek to protect themselves by creating new forms of platform-based revenues on the one hand, and real industry platforms on the other. For example in the automotive world Daimler has both created a carsharing service (Car2Go) and acquired a ride-sharing service (mytaxi) to counter UBER and enter a platform competition. Similarly, INRIX (owned by Porsche) has developed opencar, a platform to compete against Apple's carplay and Android Auto by offering automakers a specialized and configurable alternative, and most importantly, the possibility of not giving data access to Apple and Aplhabet. However, it is now considered inevitable that the hub companies should be an active partner in solving the negative sides that they are generating. There is a real possibility that in a short period of time hub companies will really drive our economy. This will require them to fully consider the long-term impact of their decisions on society, to prioritize the large economic ecosystems that increasingly revolve around them, and to accept their ethical responsibilities. In particular, there is a growing demand for these companies to add a value sharing dimension to their traditional value creation and value capturing. The ability to build and maintain a healthy ecosystem is more relevant in the long run than the ability to attack and conquer entire industries. Amazon and Alibaba enable millions of sellers in the marketplace and profit from every transaction made by merchants. Similarly, Google and Apple get billions in revenue from third-party apps that run on their platforms. In fact, both companies already invest heavily in the developer community, providing programming frameworks, software tools, opportunities and business models that enable developers to grow. Sharing at least partially the value created, with other players along the value chain and maintaining a healthy ecosystem, however, is only one of the key issues these companies face. In fact, their size is making them essential players from a social and ethical standpoint as well. Unfortunately, the approach of some of these companies towards paying taxes is extremely worrying morally as well as from the point of view of missed cashflows. Even the sometimes “naïve approach” of some software company that connects groups of stakeholders without being responsible for what happens on the platform is no longer compatible with the weight and the impact they have in the real world. From this point of view, the case of Airbnb is very interesting. Researchers outside of the company have convincingly demonstrated, that there is a greater probablility for African-American guests to see their booking request declined. The pressure is now on Airbnb to combat this bias by both educating hosts and modifying certain features of the platform. Similar pressure is also on Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which user data was used to profile and put in place actions targeted for electoral purposes. Some steps in the direction of full awareness and responsibility are already underway. Airbnb is starting to work to ensure that landlords respect municipal regulations and Facebook is similarly working to limit the phenomenon of fake news. Certainly the future is still uncertain, but it seems that the phenomenon of hub companies is not transient and that they will continue to play an absolutely relevant role in the economy for quite some time. So, to demand that they play consciously the role of focal actors that they created for themselves, is also our responsibility, not only as individuals but also as managers of companies that can play customer and supplier roles on their multistakeholder platforms.
