"The Platform" = carbonated snake oil of the new gilded age or, uh, coca-cola?

This is about what I have decided to call "The Platform" as a business model. You may be familiar with it:
Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.
airbnb, C or D?
Everybody on ILG complains about Twitch
Or perhaps you've seen Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which is perhaps the purest form of this.
It's also related to rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames"">the kerfuffle about Steam on ILG yesterday which is part of what made me want to write this post, but the other thing is this, which I learned of a long time ago in the course of my official duties but never really thought about why the data wasn't curated on github or whatever instead of behind an opaque search bar. HackerOne and another company called BugCrowd are "the platform" for connecting companies that make software with hackers who find exploitable issues in software. Providing a search bar and saying its results are "community curated" is totally platform behavior, and it's a little bit problematic. I'll get into why.

Anywhere somebody is making money by controlling access to a labor pool that they didn't hire, or controlling access to information that they don't have IP rights over, that's "the platform" business model. NB people who are more versed in the world of business and startups are welcome to correct and refine my understanding here, that's why I'm starting this thread.

"The Platform" as business model seems to me that it's either this century's "razor and blades;" or it's going to end up regulated to within an inch of its existence by various world governments until the promising profit margins dwindle and the unicorns (Uber!) turn sour (Uber). I also don't know if there are situations where the platform is more likely to be successful than others, or examples where the platform isn't basically doomed to be exploitative of other people's time and stuff (as I see it! views differ, clearly).

I'm trying to build one of these right now. Treding the fine line between facilitation and rent seeking. There only so much value in a value chain and the 'platform' is often an attempt to creep up and down the value chain squeezing every actor for 'rents'.

You can see this in uber, start by undercharging customers and overpaying drivers in a market, squeeze out the competition then reformat the business model to drive an every increasing share towards Uber. The nature of platforms is that network effects dominate so the biggest network wins. It's deeply anti-competitive and anti-trust law is so far behind the curve.

Trying to think through what differentiates (if anything does) little niche platforms from big ones i.e. FB, Google, and ISPs themselves. In the latter case there's actually tons of bespoke infrastructure and physical footprint. If you define it as loosely as I did (taking a cut from providing access to labor or information that isn't yours) then government itself is the original The Platform

start by undercharging customers and overpaying drivers in a market

aka "predatory business practices" which are supposedly illegal.