While the idea of platform governance is not new, the complex nature of its functioning and the reasons for its emergence and entrenchment still lack holistic conceptualisation. While it is impossible to develop such a perspective in a single blog post, the considerations below are intended as a sensitising tool and a call to think about platform governance as simultaneously premised upon societal developments from which it has emerged and a pervasive force shaping contemporary societies. In order to better understand the how and why of platform governance, at least two arguments are possible, although they are by no means mutually exclusive: a historico-political and an economic one. On the historico-political side – and for perhaps the most eloquent account, …