Antitrust Issues Archives - Tech Dissenter

This blog has often been critical of the current state of the tech industry. It has critiqued the negative impact that new technological developments are having on modern society. However, today I would like to discuss the upsides of a wired world.

The generic “smart person’s criticism” of the digital revolution is to say: “We all know that the Internet is great on balance, but a few major problems need to be addressed.” These articles go on to discuss only the problems, without explaining what is so obviously “great.” I often think digital critics are afraid of following their critical beliefs to their conclusion, which is that negative consequences of the digital revolution may have outweighed its positive impacts for society, perhaps out of fear of being perceived as neo-luddites or knee-jerk reactionaries.

This post’s discussion of the wonders of the Internet is not an attempt to prove why the Internet has been more good than bad. The aggregate impact of our technologies may be negative, and the question of how to weigh that impact is quite complicated. Nevertheless, aspects of our wired world have excited me and filled me with wonder during the Internet era.

Continue reading The Garden of Interconnected Delights

It increasingly appears that the economics of the Internet tend toward the monopolization of certain distinct online niches. There is one dominant search engine (Google), one dominant social networking site (Facebook), one dominant online encyclopedia (Wikipedia), and one dominant online retailer (Amazon).

Bloomberg View economics columnist Noah Smith recently wrote an article entitled “Monopolies Are Worse Than We Thought.” In it, he contends that “There’s now evidence that market concentration could . . . be hurting workers, by decreasing the share of national income that they receive. It’s probably making inequality worse.”

U.S. public policy has traditionally disapproved of monopolies. However, after the Clinton Administration’s mostly unsuccessful attempt to break up Microsoft, there have been few recent administrations that have aggressively prosecuted alleged antitrust violations within the tech sector.

Furthermore, according to Josh Barro of Business Insider, “with the possible exception of Google, these firms are so far from meeting traditional definitions of anti-trust violations that very novel enforcement definitions would have to be developed to restrict them.”

That’s the dilemma that an ambitious young law student named Lina Khan attempted to address in her article in the influential Yale Law Journal. According to Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post, she “laid out with remarkable clarity and sophistication why American antitrust law has evolved to the point that it is no longer equipped to deal with tech giants such as Amazon.com.”

Continue reading Will There Be a Digital-Age Revival of Antitrust Enforcement?