Various metaphors appear side by side in the European debate on the digital market. Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, uses the term technofeudalism in his book Technofeudalism, published by Bodley Head, and describes the large platforms as cloud landlords. Two years later, the Amsterdam Nexus Institute works with the image of the digital Wild West in the title of a published excerpt from its Apocalypse Now conference. Meanwhile, in April 2025 the European Commission issued its first two decisions on breaches of the Digital Markets Act.
Nexus named the terrain the Wild West
The Nexus Institute held the Apocalypse Now conference at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam on 22 November 2025. Panellists included Connor Leahy (CEO of Conjecture, which focuses on AI safety), essayist Leon Wieseltier and Gaya Herrington, author of the 2021 update of Limits to Growth. The seven-minute excerpt from the panel, which Nexus published in January 2026, was titled The Wild West of digital technology in a capitalist system.
Varoufakis called it technofeudalism
The term technofeudalism was brought into the mainstream by Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis with his book of the same name, published by Bodley Head in 2023. According to him, the big platforms have stopped being market players and have become cloud landlords. They extract cloud rent from traditional firms, from cloud workers and from cloud serfs, whose everyday use produces value without direct compensation. The Financial Times included the book among its Best Books of the Year 2023.
Varoufakis’s thesis rests on the difference between profit and rent. Under capitalism, rent existed inside a system dominated by profit. In technofeudalism, he argues, rent definitively takes over the dominance from profit.
Brussels ruled on DMA breaches for the first time
On 23 April 2025 the European Commission issued its first two decisions finding breaches of the Digital Markets Act, the European law on platforms. The DMA entered into force in November 2022, has applied since May 2023, and its main obligations began to apply to the first designated gatekeepers from March 2024. Apple was fined €500 million for breaching the anti-steering obligation. According to the Commission, developers distributing apps through the App Store could not freely inform customers about alternative offers outside the Apple ecosystem and steer them towards them.
Meta was fined €200 million for eight months of operating its consent or pay model on Facebook and Instagram, which the company launched in Europe in November 2023. Under the model, users either agreed to personalised advertising or paid for an ad-free version. The Commission found this to be a breach of Article 5(2) DMA, the obligation to give users a genuine choice over their data. Both companies were given 60 days to achieve compliance.
The DMA, the Digital Services Act and the AI Act together form the European framework for regulating digital platforms, the online environment and AI.
The creator economy in the light of cloud rent
Goldman Sachs estimates that the creator economy will grow from $250 billion in 2023 to $480 billion in 2027. Globally this concerns around 50 million creators. Seventy percent of their income comes from brand deals, which can run directly, through agencies or through platform marketplaces. Goldman Sachs classifies around four percent of global creators, those earning more than $100,000 a year, as professional creators.
Goldman Sachs identifies the main channels of creator monetisation. These include ad revenue sharing, such as the YouTube Partner Program, brand-direct deals through the Meta Platforms Creator Marketplace, and audience-directed monetisation such as tipping and gifting.
Through Varoufakis’s lens, cloud rent can be recognised in every one of these channels. The platform owns the distribution layer, takes a share of the transaction and defines the rules under which the creator takes part. The Commission does not use the term cloud rent. Its April decisions are the first sharp test of whether the DMA can reach specific mechanisms of platform power. They target rules that prevent leaving the ecosystem, and models that make the use of user data a condition of access to the service.
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