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Guest Talk with Simone Cicero | Perspectives on the Platforms vs Protocols Debate: A Reality Check

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Simone Cicero presents a systematic comparison of platform and protocol business models, arguing that platforms derive value from a triad of product, marketplace, and extensibility features while protocols can theoretically deliver equivalent or better value propositions but suffer from weaker defensibility and immature go-to-market organizational doctrine. He proposes that protocols may extract revenue legitimately only when they maintain stateful representations and run infrastructural functions, and discusses cases like ONDC in India where policy enforcement, not organic competition, solves the bootstrapping problem.

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go-to-market-organizational-doctrine-for-protocols governance guest-talks innovation-cycles-and-commoditization-of-complements platforms-vs-protocols-value-proposition protocols research stateful-vs-networkless-protocols-and-fee-extraction vertical-unbundling-and-the-unbundling-fallacy