A Few Thoughts on Antitrust and Big Tech

I'm no antitrust expert, but I do have some opinions on it, and I'm going to offer a few of them in this post. As an intro, I want to mention a speech by Notre Dame law professor Roger Alford -- whose Opinio Juris blog posts have triggered some good IELP blog discussion in the past -- that touches on some recent controversies related to the Trump administration DOJ's antitrust enforcement. The full speech is worth a read. To be clear, I have no knowledge of any of this besides what is in Roger's speech, and I hadn't even seen the news headlines about these events when they first happened.

Now let me get to my own views of antitrust, in particular as it relates to Big Tech. I'm somewhat of a Big Tech skeptic these days. I think the products and services offered by many of the Big Tech companies have gotten worse over time, and that their business models are a core part of the problem. As an example, one aspect of these business models is the use of consumers' personal data as a way to generate revenue. I think this often makes the products and services worse, as well as being a serious threat to privacy and safety, and I wish companies would shift away from it.

At the same time, I think antitrust is almost totally irrelevant to the concerns about Big Tech. Stopping a few mergers or objecting to a handful of specific practices will not change the fundamental nature of how these companies have been approaching things. I hear some people talk about empowering "Little Tech" to challenge Big Tech, but from what I can tell the practical outcome here is likely to be that some of the Little Tech companies -- which, to be clear, are not a bunch of mom and pop businesses -- simply become the new Big Tech. I don't think that helps the situation much, and therefore I'm not very excited when Little Tech advocates push for antitrust laws to be used to rein in Big Tech.

So what I would do instead, if I were in government? I don't have anything close to a comprehensive plan, but one thing I would do is use the bully pulpit to explain to people how the existing tech business models work, how they can be harmful, and what other models are possible. As part of this, I would point people to the work of Mike Masnick, including a short piece entitled "Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness," which ends with this line: "We need to stop waiting for saviors and start saving the internet ourselves." (If you like podcasts, you can also listen to Masnick on Aaron Ross Powell's podcast, in an episode entitled "Reclaiming the Internet.")

Another possibility is for the government to opt for companies with better business models when it is selecting products or services for its own use. In many cases, there are alternatives, and having a big user such as the U.S. government (or any other government) going for these alternatives would be very helpful for making markets more competitive and giving us better products and services.

Regulation is also possible, although in practice regulation has tended to make it more difficult for new competitors to enter the market, and in some cases has been downright harmful, so I'm wary. If your response to the concerns about Big Tech is regulation, I would want to know what exactly that regulation would say and how you think it would improve things.

In some ways, the internet was better back in the days when Roger Alford was blogging regularly at Opinio Juris, before social media took off (social media is one part of the Big Tech problem). I don't think social media is inherently bad, but I do think it needs to be reshaped, in particular by shifting away from "walled gardens" and moving to decentralized social media, and away from company-provided algorithmic feeds to alternatives such as custom feeds. Antitrust is unlikely to do that, but I think all of us, as users of the internet, can help make social media and the rest of the internet better.