=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2505/paper02
|storemode=property
|title=A Review of Ethical Discussions on Platforms and Ecosystems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2505/paper02.pdf
|volume=Vol-2505
|authors=Hyrynsalmi Sami,Koskinen Jani,Hyrynsalmi Sonja M.
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/tethics/HyrynsalmiKH19
}}
==A Review of Ethical Discussions on Platforms and Ecosystems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2505/paper02.pdf
A Review of Ethical Discussions on Platforms and
Ecosystems
Hyrynsalmi Sami 1[0000-0002-5073-3750], Koskinen Jani 2[0000-0001-8325-9277], and Hyrynsalmi
Sonja M. 3[0000-0002-1715-6250]
1
Pervasive Computing, Tampere University of Technology, Pori, Finland and Lappeenranta–
Lahti University of Technology, Lahti, Finland
2
Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
3
Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
sami.hyrynsalmi@tuni.fi
Abstract. Since the breakthrough of Apple’s iOS platform and AppStore market-
place a decade ago, different kinds of ecosystems and platforms have con- quered
the world. In the ecosystem-based business model, a platform owner offers a
technological solution (e.g., Apple, Google) for end-users (e.g., smart phone us-
ers) and producers (e.g., application and content developers). The platform owner
benefits, either directly or indirectly, from the transactions between end-users and
producers taking place in the platform. As the ecosystem-based model has gained
popularity and de facto status in the industry, also critical voices in ethical prob-
lems and questions for the new model has raised. This paper reviews recent liter-
ature (n=20) on ethical discussion on platforms and ecosystems in order to sum-
marise the current development and suggest some future avenues. The review
show that several disciplines, from law to technology ethics and sociology, are
addressing the same phenomena from different viewpoints. However, further
studies are requested to support the building of a comprehensive view on com-
plex concerns.
Keywords: Ecosystem ethics, targeted review, literature study, platform, ethics,
ecosystem
1 Introduction
Software platforms and ecosystems have become a de facto way of working in the soft-
ware industry. Driven by the popularity and success of Apple's iOS platform and its
store, abundance of di_erent companies, such as SAP and Microsoft, have started to
offer their products as a platform for external developers (Hyrynsalmi, 2014).
However, the new approach has also gained critique and, for example, Bergvall-
Kåreborn and Howcroft (2013) describe Apple’s new approach as a way to “[...] harness
creative labour at little or no cost while minimising risk”. The new approach centralises
the power to the platform owner, strengthen barriers to entry and makes the entry of
newcomers harder. Therefore there are and has been different projects that are aiming
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
10
to create alternative data ecosystems as alternative choices (see Decode, 2019; Mesin-
fos, 2019; Sitra, 2019). Likewise, European commission has started to aim more open
solutions in data economy ecosystems that includes free flow of data, but also protects
people rights considering their personal information (EU 2017).
In addition, it is worth to note that Stallman (2010) have criticised the use of the term
‘ecosystem’ to describe a software or a human community. According to him, ecosys-
tems imply the lack of intention and ethics. Stallman (2010) points out that software is
a results of both of these, and thus the term is misleading.
Thus, there are various critiques and raised ethical concerns towards platforms and
ecosystems. The prior work is scattered and there is a lack of comprehensive picture.
This paper aims to fill this gap. The objective of this paper is to map recent discussion
on ethical aspects related to the software platforms and ecosystems. The study uses a
targeted (or non-systematic) literature review approach (Huelin, Iheanacho, Payne, &
Sandman, 2015).
By using a set of four papers as a seed, a total of 20 primary studies are selected with
snowballing technique. The primary studies are analysed and ethical concerns are
mapped. The results show that ethical concerns related to freedom of expression are
widely discussed in various disciplines, but also that the ethical discussion is lacking
depth both in presented arguments as well as in different relationships between the eco-
system actors.
The remaining of this study is structured as follow. Section 2 defines the key concept
for this review. The research process is discussed in Section 3 and the results are given
in Section 4. Key findings and limitations are discussed in Section 5 and Section 6
concludes the study.
2 Key concepts
Since the seminal work by Moore (1993, 1996) seminal work on defining a business
ecosystem, a series of different kinds of ecosystem have been presented (c.f. Seppänen,
Hyrynsalmi, Manikas, & Suominen, 2017). To put Moore’s (1996) view simply, a busi-
ness ecosystem is a loose network of organisations including suppliers, customers and
competitors involved in delivery of goods or services are connected. The network
evolves gradually and the participants of the ecosystems are affected by the other play-
ers in the ecosystem as well as by the competing ecosystems. However, as pointed out
by Gueguen and Isckia (2011), borders of an ecosystem are unclear.
In the software industry, a software platform is often in the centre of an ecosystem
(Jansen, Finkelstein, & Brinkkemper, 2009). A platform is either a partial or a full soft-
ware product or a service, for which third-party suppliers can develop their comple-
menting products and services, named as complementaries. For example, a gaming con-
sole (i.e., hardware and operating system) is a platform that allows game producers and
software developers (i.e., third-party vendors) to offer their games and software appli-
cations (i.e., complementaries) to the end-users.
The platform creates a software ecosystem around it, which consists of the platform
owner—also named as ecosystem orchestrator—as well as consumers and independent
11
software producers (Manikas & Hansen, 2013). A software ecosystem is, according to
Jansen et al. (2009), “a set of actors functioning as a unit and interacting with a shared
market for software and services, together with the relationships among them. These
relationships are frequently underpinned by a common technological platform or mar-
ket and operate through the exchange of information, resources and artefacts.”
Likewise the data may be the core that creates the ecosystem. According to Oliveira
and Lóscio (2018) a data ecosystem is:
“...a set of networks composed by autonomous actors that directly or indirectly con-
sume, produce or provide data and other related resources (e.g., software, services and
infrastructure). Each actor per- forms one or more roles and is connected to other ac-
tors through relationships, in such a way that actors collaboration and competition
promotes data ecosystem self-regulation.”.
Koskinen, Knaapi-Junnila, and Rantanen (2019) has combined the definitions of
business ecosystem and data ecosystems and come up with term data economy ecosys-
tem defined as:
“Data economy ecosystem is a network, that is formed by different actors of ecosys-
tem, that are using data as a main source or instance for business. Different actors and
stakeholders are connected directly or indirectly within network and it’s value chains.
Data economy ecosystem also incorporates the rules (official or unofficial), that di-
rect action allowed in network.”
The relationship between actors in an ecosystem can be complex and involve several
layers (Yu, Ramaswamy, & Bush, 2008). For example, some actors in an ecosystem
can be direct competitors against each other with their offering, but still doing cooper-
ation in order to support the whole ecosystem Brandenburger and Nalebuff (1997). The
reason is that the fate of both firms is depending on the fate of the ecosystem and its
success (Iansiti & Levien, 2004).
Ecosystem ethics, by following the usage by Koskinen, Rantanen, Kimppa, and
Hyrynsalmi (2017), refers to discussion on ethical concerns related to ecosystems and
their management. For example, previously there has been discussion whether a plat-
form owner, who often have monopoly and ultimate power in the ecosystem, should
allow all producers to publish whatever they wish in the platform, or should the plat-
form owner have a control over what is offered in its marketplace (Koskinen et al.,
2017).
Finally, it is worth to note that the concept of ‘ecosystem’ has also been criticised.
For example, Oh, Phillips, Park, and Lee (2016) questioned whether the addition of the
‘eco-’ prefix into ‘innovation system’ has bring any value. Furthermore, Hyrynsalmi
and Hyrynsalmi (2019) argues that the overuse of the ‘ecosystem’ term has caused that
the concept is starting losing its content and becoming a zombie term, just a empty buzz
word. They requested that the term should be carefully defined in the further use in
order to maintain its content. To follow their recommendations, we rely on the denitions
given above.
12
3 Research process
This paper uses a literature review as a tool to recapitulate the current discussion on
platform and ecosystem ethics. The main objective is to map the discourse, offer a sum-
mary as well as point avenues for future work.
Literature studies can be roughly divided into two main categories (Kitchen- ham &
Charters, 2007): systematic literature studies and non-systematic studies. Systematic
studies aim to systematically and objectively find and summarise all available evidence.
Non-systematic studies, instead, aim to offer informative, but not all-encompassing re-
view on the issue at hand (Huelin et al., 2015).
This study utilises non-systematic review in order to gather relevant primary studies.
This paper is a targeted literature review where in-depth and pre-defined protocol, but
not systematic. As the field is underdeveloped due to scattering in different publication
fora and vocabulary is not standardised, traditional systematic literature gathering
methods—electronics searches with keywords to selected databases or manual search-
ing through selected publication fora—would not have been useful. Thus, to offer a
starting point for the future studies, this paper follows snowballing technique, as de-
fined by Wohlin (2014), for gathering primary studies.
For this study, we used the process described as follow. We selected a small set of
primary studies (four papers) known to address the area. For those papers, we did back-
ward and forward snowballing—i.e., we studied the references that the primary study
is using as well as we studied papers which are referring to the primary study. We
repeated this iteratively until no new papers were anymore added. We included studies
that were discussing any ethical issues related to software platforms or ecosystems. We
excluded studies written with other languages than English as well as clearly non-peer
reviewed content (e.g., blogs, Master’s theses, news articles). The studies were first
evaluated by title and abstract. The searches were done in mid-August 2019.
After the searches had terminated, all selected papers were read through and ana-
lysed by the authors. The frequent themes appearing in the primary studies were iden-
tified and categorised into major groups.
4 Results
4.1 Frequent themes
The primary studied selected to this literature review are shown in Table 1. Studies that
were used as a seed for the backward and forward snowballing are marked with asterisk
in the table. In the following, frequently appearing themes are presented alongside with
short summaries of primary studies.
Freedom of expression, right to install.
Wolk (2010) and Lee and Soon (2017) study jailbreaking, i.e., a process of exploiting
vulnerabilities in order to install software that would not otherwise be available in the
13
product. Wolk (2010) addresses the legal point of view, but note that that a device could
be better if there would be no installation restrictions.
Hestres (2013) discusses on ‘app neutrality’; e.g., consumers’ and producers’ free-
dom of expression to install and publish what they want for smart devices. Daly (2011)
discusses on the same issue: Apple has completely power over applications available
in the store as well as preventing users to install content that the platform owner do not
wish to see. DeNardis and Hackl (2015), on the other, discusses on consumer’s right to
freedom of expression on social media platforms.
Tonner (2013) and Curwin (2015) addresses tethering applications and their block-
ing in a mobile application store. Whereas the discussion focuses solely on this area,
Tonner notes how blocking hinders innovations in the mobile application space. Gil-
lespie (2017) takes a broad view and discuss how platforms of any kind—from social
media to application ecosystems—structure and dictate the content and speech in their
areas of business.
Table 1. Primary studies selected for this review.
Koskinen et al. (2017) continues this theme by defining ecosystem ruling dilemma as a
question whether a platform owner can restrict one’s right to freedom of expression
against the owner’s right to dictate the content in their avenue.
14
Ethical governance
Castree III (2012) addresses cyber-plagiarism among producers in the digital media
stores. While the focus of the article is on legislation improvements, it also addresses,
e.g., relationships between developers in an ecosystem. Mejia (2013) continues the
theme with focus being on mobile games.
Kimppa et al. (2018), on the other hand, discuss on ethical issues regarding platform
owners’, often representing industrialised countries, relationships to and business ven-
tures with software producers from developing countries. They emphasise points for
(e.g., developing country software developers gain access to a developed market with
the platform owner) and against (e.g., platform owners can exploit underdeveloped
markets) this kind of collaborations.
Rantanen, Koskinen, and Hyrynsalmi (2019) define a new concept of e- government
ecosystem as a vehicle to explain e-government systems and point ethical governance
as a part of it. Rantanen, Hyrynsalmi, and Hyrynsalmi (2019) present a systematic lit-
erature study on ethical management of data ecosystems.
Koskinen et al. (2019) proposed the new people-centric approach for data economy
ecosystems as fair basis for governance model in Habermasian spirit. They derive main
ideas of people-centricity and informed consent from medical field that has been fore-
runner of those issues a long time. Koskinen et al. (2019) demand more human ap-
proach for data economy ecosystems to balance field ecosystems of dominated by few
central player — as individuals have no real possibilities way to influence the ecosys-
tem in current situation.
Legislation, censorship and value creation
Clelland (2014) discuss on iOS ecosystem’s bright and dark value creation. He pin-
points that the monopoly position of the ecosystem core company allows it exploit third
party workers. Whereas the paper focus on migrant workers in the component produc-
tion and assembly, the observations can be, to some extend, to be generalised to soft-
ware producers.
Ververis et al. (2019) study application censorship in different countries. They note
that, for some reason or another, certain applications are not available in certain coun-
tries. However, different kinds of circumvention tools have been prevented.
Finally, S ́ıthigh (2013) ponders legislation in the case of application markets. As
one of the area addressed in the paper, he notes the relationship between the platform
owner (i.e., Apple) and the mobile developers. In addition, he addresses also consum-
ers’ rights in the marketplace. Härkönen et al. (2019) discuss on ethicality and social
responsibility of platform economy giants. They point that the platform giants have
almost unlimited power and little competition in their businesses.
It is worth to note that there are plethora of work done in domain of plat- forms and
antitrust. For example, Khan (2017) discusses on Amazon and its unchallenged position
in platform markets and Sharma (2019) points out that restricting access to APIs might
promote anticompetitive practices. Khan argues that Amazon’s business strategy has
concerns against the spirit of anticompetitive laws. However, these are restricted from
our survey as their focus has been on legislational, not ethical, issues. Nevertheless,
also these aspects should be studied further in future work.
15
4.2 Relationship analysis
As pointed out by Jansen et al. (2009), software ecosystems are about relationships
between different kinds of actors. For this review, we studied what relationships be-
tween actors have been addressed in the literature. We identified four main stakeholder
groups: Platform owner, Consumer, Producer and Government. The three first are often
discussed in literature (cf. Hyrynsalmi, 2014), whereas the last one appeared frequently
in primary studies.
Figure 1 illustrates the observed ethical discussion on relationships in the primary
studies. In the figure, the relationships are directed according to whose concerns are
addressed. For example, governmental censorship against certain applications in the
marketplace is denoted with the edge Government → Platform owner. The amount of
concerns raised per relationship is not illustrated.
As the figure reveals, the discussion has been concentrated to ethical concerns be-
tween the platform owner and consumer as well as platform owner and producer. As
the platforms allow transaction of goods and services between two different side of a
market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003), this is not a surprise. However, the lack of discussion
on ethical concerns between other parties might indicate that the literature is overtly
focused on these relationships.
Finally, from Figure 1 one can also deduce areas missing ethical discussions. For
example, in the review, we could not find, for example, discussion raised regarding the
Consumer à Consumer relationship. Nevertheless, it is worth to note that not all rela-
tionships might be worth of discussion in the ecosystem ethics context. For example,
this context might not offer new insights into the Consumer ßàGovernemnt relation-
ships.
16
Fig. 1. Directed relationship of ethical concerns between different actors in an ecosystem.
5 Discussion
5.1 Key findings
We summarise our key findings into the following three points:
First, despite that the literature on ethical aspects of platforms and ecosystems is
diverse, there are a few clear and shared focal points. Frequently appearing theme is the
question of freedom of expression, both from producers’ and consumers’ point-of-view.
While most of this discussion seems to focus on Apple and its ecosystem, there are also
more general observations presented (e.g. Gillespie, 2017; Koskinen et al., 2017).
Fruitfully, this question has been discussed from multitude of approaches ranging
from legislation to information ethics. Nevertheless, more work are needed to summa-
rize recent developments in this question as well as to generalise more usable guidelines
for all kinds of platforms and ecosystems.
Second, the relationship analysis of ethical concerns show that the studied literature
has focused on the concerns between platform owner and consumers as well as between
platform owner and producers. Other concerns are infrequently, if at all, addressed.
Third, while we were able to find 20 primary studies, this review show also that the
platform and ecosystem ethics is underdeveloped area. Some of the analysed concerns
relied on anecdotal evidence and discussion on single cases. Only a few of the primary
studies presented empirical material.
5.2 Limitations
Naturally, this study has certain limitations. First and foremost, the study is based on
targeted literature review method and most likely not all available primary studies have
been gathered. This certainly limits the result only the studied papers.
Second, due to the snowballing method, the selected primary studies might be biased
towards certain areas. Therefore, the selection of the seed papers is crucial. For this
17
study, we selected a set of recent studies representing a few different kinds of ecosys-
tems. Yet, a more systematic gathering of primary studies would draw more compre-
hensive picture of the issue at hand.
Third, it is worth to note that the used research process (i.e., seed articles and snow-
balling) might cause that only articles inside a certain academic school of thought –i.e.,
articles referring to each others – is identified. Thus, there is a risk that another research
`cluster' is not included as there are no references between the cluster that we found and
the others.
6 Conclusions
It seems that the research of ethics of ecosystems and platforms it still at infancy and
there founds only a handful of papers about topic. However, the included studies of
review has shown that there are different ethical issues to consider even the larger pic-
ture is still blurred and taking a shape. This papers main contribution is that it shows
the lack of ethical research of ecosystems. Our analysis brings forward the need for
research, so we could see the issues that should be dealt with ecosystems and platforms
from ethical perspective and ensure the good for the society. Thus, there is need for
research focusing on specific ethical issues likewise there exists demand for research
with wide scale analyse of challenges that arise in this ecosystem context.
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