Platform Technologies and Representatin Problem: Uber and Booking.com Cases

By examining the company cases of Booking.com and Uber, this study focuses on the representational gaps in new areas of politics, which are created by the new economy. By analyzing the problems of representation in these new areas, this study focuses on how these firms have changed the market structure, triggered the interest relations and created new areas of intervention. The reasons of the selection of Uber and Booking.com as case examples include that: both have engaged with legal proceedings in Turkey; they have innovative practices as a challenge to the traditional market; there are different prohibitions and regulations about these firms around the world. While digital platform firms are defined as ‘regulatory entrepreneurs’, there are three categories of how these digital platforms provoke legal changes: (1) Violating the law or taking advantage of the gray areas of law; (2) Ensuring a significant growth in the market so that they cannot be prohibited; (3) Mobilizing consumers and other stakeholders for political power; (4) More traditional political techniques to apply. Therefore, beyond the formal-non-formal and politics-political dilemmas of the representation problem, this study analyzes how digital platform firms create ambiguous, contradictory, and uncertain areas of politics. Moreover, this study examines how these firms constitute again more contradictory problems of representation during the intervention processes. As such, by probing the conditional approaches and interactions of the actors, this study also indirectly reveals the gaps in the representation of those who are in favor of these services as well as firms that provide these services. Therefore, this study presents that professional associations have created the representational gaps by engaging interestbased activities that seem to result in creating the gaps in the representation of innovative technologies and markets of the new economy. Moreover, this gap in representation creates the areas of conflict even among NGOs within the same sector. In light of this insight, the case analysis results with 6 factors to analyze the problem of representation. These factors are as follows: (1) Institutional choices, (2) Who participated, (3) Who is excluded, (4) How is participated, (5) Reasons for participation, (6) Impact on the outcome. Therefore, the outcomes of this study might be summarized as follows: (1) There is a lack of regulation on protecting the rights of digital platform firms and their services in Turkey; (2) Regulations triggered by new technologies create different