governance of technology and governance through technology
Class Four: Regulating Tech Monopolies
For each quote, we plan on discussing it, placing it into its context, and understanding how it fits into the broader discussion about bias.
- Quotes from the Propsect
- Tech platforms with large networks also capture huge quantities of data, which makes them extremely valuable.
- Tech company platforms derive their power and usefulness from their user base. The more users a platform has, the more useful and profitable it becomes. Why do we think users don’t exit these platforms and take away their powers?
- The second feature of tech platforms is that the platform is distinct from the users who are on the platform, even as many platforms also have business lines or products that operate on the platform. To put it another way, the platform owns some of the users—which in turn compete with outside users. For example, Amazon Basics produces and sells goods on Amazon’s marketplace—alongside other companies’ goods. Google gathers reviews of restaurants and it shows that data on Search—alongside companies like Yelp, which do the same thing.
- A second set of problems—conflicts of interest—emerges when a company both owns the platform and has business lines that operate on the platform.
- Platform companies position themselves as a free market place and then promote their own business lines. This seems like an obvious point of anti-trust. However, they are also providing the marketplace that allows everyone else to be at the table. Do they have a right to promote their own products and services over others given that they provide the digital spaces for others to offer their services?
- Tech mergers mean that a single company gets data from multiple different platforms—and that a rising platform in one sector can’t compete with a platform in another.
- The goals of many start ups are to gain users to be bought out. Venture Capital firms and other investment groups encourage this behavior because a buy out is a smalelr investment risk than actually trying to make a competitor. How can we stop this free market phenomenon?
- Since the 1970s, antitrust scholars, policymakers, and regulators have been enthralled by a neoliberal approach to antitrust that focuses on consumer prices, and is deliberately blind to the broader harms of concentrated markets
- If the quote on quote consumer price is free, how can existing anti-trust practices apply? Who is the user: the advertiser or the end user providing the data?
- some businesses are essential for society and commercial activity to function properly. As a result, they have a duty to accept any customers in a nondiscriminatory fashion.
- What is essential to society?
- It would quarantine the monopoly, separating it from owning any other business lines.
- Not a bad idea. How can we implement this for 21st century digital tech
- Over time and across industries, three simple principles emerged for how to address this kind of challenge: quarantine, nondiscrimination, and regulation of rates.
- Quotes from MIT Technology Review
- Make big tech companies share data with smaller ones
- What about user consent? I may consent to company A having my data by may not want comapny B to have access to it.
- Don’t let big tech platforms discriminate in favor of themselves
- How deep does this go? Should Netflix not be able to advertise their in-house productions over acquisitions?
- Stop tech companies from locking in their users
- A digital identity wallet locks users into wherever that is stored and kept. How could we incentivize companies to create interoperability standards? Who gets to set those standards?
Feedback (5 minutes)
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