The abstract says,
This article discusses how to move antitrust enforcement forward in a constructive manner during a time of widespread and growing concern over the political and economic power of large corporations in the United States. Three themes are emphasized. First, a body of economic evidence supports more vigorous merger enforcement in the United States. This can and should be done in a manner consistent with sound economic principles. Tighter merger control can be achieved by utilizing the existing legal presumption against highly concentrating mergers and by reinvigorating the potential competition doctrine to block mergers between firms that may well become important direct rivals in the foreseeable future. Second, close antitrust scrutiny is appropriate for today’s largest and most powerful firms, including those in the tech sector. However, the coherence and integrity of antitrust require that successful firms not be attacked simply because they obtain dominant positions. Proper antitrust enforcement regarding unilateral conduct by dominant firms should continue to focus on identifying specific conduct that harms customers or disrupts the competitive process, especially conduct that excludes pesky, disruptive rivals. Third, while antitrust enforcement has a vital role to play in keeping markets competitive, antitrust law and antitrust institutions are ill suited to directly address concerns associated with the political power of large corporations or other public policy goals such as income inequality or job creation. Campaign finance reform, tax policy, labor, education, and other policies are far better suited to address those critical public policy goals.
My emphasis. Pointer from Timothy Taylor.
I think that a lot of problems with the dominant firms in tech would go away if somebody were to come up with a subscription model that can displace the advertising model. With subscriptions, the interests of the consumer and the service provider are better aligned. Anti-trust is ill suited to fixing that.
The current advertising models of Facebook and Google are inevitably going to implode all on their own, and it isn’t going to be pretty. I think we are are in the beginning stages of that now.
Microsoft Windows has been using the subscription model for a couple of years now, and the results have been very troubling for those of us who believe my computer is my castle. I won’t have it in my house anymore.
While antitrust law has its limits, it at least has the potential to rein in evil giants such as Google and Facebook and keep them that way. Regulatory regimes such as net neutrality will only play right into their hands by keeping new competitors to them from forming.
This seems to me related to the comment you left on your previous post: we just haven’t had time to develop social or legal means to manage the various issues created by the emergence on the scene of these new, quasi-monopoly media entities. Indeed, this was the argument behind the proposals for new antitrust laws in 1890 and 1914: new social conditions lead to the need for new regulatory regimes.
At present, we don’t have any other conceptual or legal model for dealing with “social problems resulting from giant quasi-monoply companies that might be remedied by forcing them to stay broken up into smaller competitors,” besides “antitrust”. That doesn’t mean we don’t now need some new antitrust-like regime, especially to deal with circumstances of dominating concentration which arise spontaneously as consequences of technological and economic developments (e.g., winner take all dynamics), and not from the “consciously anticompetitive bad behaviors” that Shapiro described.
Now, even though existing the antitrust regime is not ideally suited to these new circumstances doesn’t mean that acting under the existing model wouldn’t still be preferable to what would happen by opening the door to creating a completely new regulatory concept and law.
I think that a lot of problems with the dominant firms in tech would go away if somebody were to come up with a subscription model that can displace the advertising model.
Yet, this does not appear to be happening and that solution does nothing with Amazon. And how many subscriptions are succeeding? A few of them like NYT and WaPo have grown with Trump are still in the 2M+ range which is still 1% of the US population and have strong reputations.
Realize a lot kids are learning Google plus tools at school for free so they are learning the system.
I believe in micro-pricing. We will buy off the ads as they come with a statement in our search text.
Facebook represents one of the major productivity gains to technology. Yes you are being sold to be targeted. If the law of one price still pertains, I am not sure that’s harmful.
It’s interesting to ponder the alternate timeline where the DOJ blocked Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.