Platform Disempowerment: Business Power and the Taxation of Digital Financial Services

This article advances our understanding of the political power of digital platform companies by uncovering its underexplored flipside: platform disempowerment. We argue that controlling an infrastructure that becomes ubiquitous in economic and social interactions can become a source of weakness as well as strength. Using primary interview and secondary data, we provide comparative case studies of mobile money taxation in Kenya and Ghana. As governments in both countries faced fiscal pressures, the profitability and captivity of the market that flowed from mobile money providers’ control of digital payment infrastructure caught their attention. Different outcomes in the two countries result from the interaction between the industry’s political entanglements and its infrastructural control: in Kenya, entanglements were strong, creating a dynamic of empowerment, while the opposite was the case in Ghana. The article contributes to broader debates about the sources and limits of the political power of digital platforms, while expanding the field of empirical cases to an underexplored region.