Big Tech rules our digital lives—but who pays them? This book unpacks how data commodification, financialisation, and legal frameworks entrench monopoly power, while pointing to contradictions that open space for alternatives.

Join us to discuss this book with authors Paško Bilić and Toni Prug

At a moment when Big Tech firms dominate not only markets but also politics, culture, research and daily life, The Political Economy of Digital Monopolies offers a bold rethinking of what monopoly means in the digital age.

Paško Bilić, Toni Prug, and Mislav Žitko bring Marxian theory into dialogue with the realities of platform capitalism, showing how data commodification, financialisation, and legal infrastructures shape the extraordinary power of a handful of tech giants.

Moving beyond fashionable buzzwords, the book provides both theoretical clarity and empirical depth, asking where do some of the Big Tech giants get their profit from, unveilling what are social platforms "actually selling".

Written in accessible and incisive prose, it will be indispensable for scholars, students, activists, and anyone concerned with the future of digital capitalism.

This is a Technology, Inequality and Development Research Group Seminar

 

Speakers

Paško Bilić is a researcher and analyst based in Zagreb, where he serves as a research associate at the Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO). His scholarship focuses on political economy, value theory, and critical perspectives on digital capitalism. Bilić’s work engages with Marxian theory, regulation, and alternatives for more democratic control over digital infrastructures.

Toni Prug is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Rijeka. Trained as a software and networks engineer before completing his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, his work bridges political economy, critical theory, and technology. He is a founding member of the Platform for Social Equality, a collaborative initiative advancing egalitarian approaches to public wealth and distribution.