Is there a proposed new language/definition? The article's discussion still seems to be centered on price.
"her paper highlights how the consumer welfare view of antitrust fails to curb the predatory pricing".
I said it elsewhere, but I not against the idea of trust-busting, but the industry analogies typically brought up don't really fit. The closest I can find in general discussion is that the services are a public good, but we tolerate/promote monopolies in those sectors (like utilities).
Agreed. I don't think there are really any mainstream alternative proposals in the policy sphere, at least not that I've seen. I've seen technologists grapple with what might make sense, like Ben Thompson for instance, but they don't seem to have the ear of government actors. Which is why I'm so frustrated by the conflation with monopoly regulation. It is actively a distraction to the policy discussion. Every time they go to Congress, there is all this focus on "breaking them up", but it's all just really misguided and beside the point, and I blame the monopoly confusion for that.
What do you think is a better way to frame the policy discussion? I assume they use the monopoly angle (perhaps in a misguided fashion) because it is a tried-and-true template for regulating corporations with too much power.
A better framing would be to focus on specific problems: "Facebook owning both facebook.com and Instagram and both Messenger and WhatsApp give them too much market power in social sharing and messaging, so Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun back out", "Amazon should not be able to use sales metrics of other platform sellers to inform their own product development", etc. Identify market issues, figure out regulatory language that speaks to those issues.
But "big companies are monopolies that must be broken up" is unhelpfully reductive.
I agree with you, and I'm just following up for a finer point.
It's my understanding the whole intent of anti-trust is consumer welfare. The connection between Amazon and pricing/competition seems to be a straight-forward connection between hurting consumer welfare and its market power in terms of Amazon's market power. But where does the connection come in between consumer welfare and the social media apps? I.e., how does FB hurt me by having the most/best information regarding my social network?
Or is your stance it shouldn't be framed in terms of consumer welfare at all?
Yeah I don't really buy the consumer welfare framing. Or maybe I do buy it for existing anti trust regulation. But I don't buy that it is the only thing we (as a society) should be looking at when considering regulation of companies. This isn't novel, we regulate other externalities even when the regulations themselves harm consumers in the direct sense. For instance, more environmental regulations result in higher prices. But they are often good for other reasons, like not poisoning drinking water. We just don't use anti trust regulation to do this.
Basically I just don't see anti trust regulation as being the best way to target the diverse set of issues society sees with the big tech companies of the moment.
