(Roughly) Daily

After a characteristically-clear explanation of the ways in which the “monopoly practice” concerns around Google, Amazon, and the other on-line giants are different from those the U.S. has traditionally tried to manage– they limit/manage choice– the ever-illuminating Tim O’Reilly argues for a fresh approach to anti-trust:

So how are we therefore best to decide if these Big Tech platforms need to be regulated?

In one famous exchange, Bill Gates, the founder and former CEO of Microsoft, told Chamath Palihapitiya, the one-time head of the Facebook platform:

“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”

Given this understanding of the role of a platform, regulators should be looking to measure whether companies like Amazon or Google are continuing to provide opportunity for their ecosystem of suppliers, or if they’re increasing their own returns at the expense of that ecosystem.

Rather than just asking whether consumers benefit in the short term from the companies’ actions, regulators should be looking at the long-term health of the marketplace of suppliers—they are the real source of that consumer benefit, not the platforms alone. Have Amazon, Apple, or Google

earned

their profits, or are they coming from monopolistic rents?

How might we know whether a company operating an algorithmically managed marketplace is extracting rents rather than simply taking a reasonable cut for the services it provides? The first sign may not be that it is raising prices for consumers, but that it is taking a larger percentage from its suppliers, or competing unfairly with them.

Before antitrust authorities look to remedies like breaking up these companies, a good first step would be to require disclosure of information about the growth and health of the supply side of their marketplaces. The statistics about the growth of its third-party marketplace that Bezos trumpeted in his shareholder letter tell only half the story. The questions to ask are who profits, by how much, and how that allocation of rewards is changing over time…

Data is the currency of these companies. It should also be the currency of those looking to regulate them. You cannot regulate what you don’t understand. The algorithms that these companies use may be defended as trade secrets, but their outcomes should be open to inspection.

An important read: “Antitrust regulators are using the wrong tools to break up Big Tech.”

* Molly Ivins

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As we bust trusts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court.  Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski had subpoenaed the tapes as part of on-going impeachment proceedings; the White House had sued to quash; and the decision is widely viewed as a crucial precedent limiting the power of any U.S. president to claim executive privilege.

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