For those who are not familiar: a worker cooperative (or co-op) is a company that's majority-owned by the workers themselves.
A platform co-op, meanwhile, is kind of a hybrid where the co-op is owned by the workers that build it but also by the *customers* that use it.
@zkat it seems "easy" for these cases, but the internet itself needs to be public infrastructure and all our recent models have undermined that
@meena what's public infrastructure if not a co-op owned by its consumers, in the end
@zkat the actual cables and satellites connecting us, which mostly belong to private carriers.
@zkat an illustrative example connecting the dots of how this plays out is cloud storage:
it costs practically nothing to store stuff in the cloud. The thing that costs so much is the transfer. that cost is set by carriers and ISPs and externalised by cloud providers to their customers, or more likely, to their customers' customers.
So, for example, one might build a ride share app where the software is built by worker-owners, but is also owned by the drivers themselves.
Everyone invests their time, money, and energy into the project.
And everyone gets a cut out the surplus as needed.
And everyone wins.