Panel, Conference Presentation
Big Tech and Antitrust: Rethinking Competition Policy for the Digital Era
- The Justice Department may approve the AT&T and Time Warner merger if pro-competitive innovations using the Warner Brothers Library and HBO resolve competitive harms, potentially through asset injunctions rather than a full block.
- Regulatory scrutiny of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger will focus on output effects, with expectations that it will be difficult to prove pro-competitive benefits given prior price reductions, while predictions suggest the deal could cost U.S. consumers more in increased "phone tax bills" than the Trump administration's tax cuts.
- Antitrust enforcement may target companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon if credible evidence shows they block market entry or threaten monopolies, with specific concern that Amazon directing voice search results solely to its own products could violate laws.
- Regulatory risks include the possibility that lawmakers must treat digital platforms as utilities or common carriers if they fail to enforce antitrust laws, while the speaker warns that static competition measures like price snapshots could be counterproductive if they stifle paradigm-shifting innovation.
- Data portability initiatives similar to phone number portability are expected to increase competition and lower prices, though European GDPR regulations are projected to create a regulatory moat that disadvantages smaller companies and reinforces the dominance of Facebook and Google.
- New market dynamics may emerge where consumers value privacy enough to pay for data subscriptions, or platforms may pay consumers if data value exceeds service value, while voice search is identified as the critical technical threat to Google's dominance and a pivotal area for competition analysis.
- Future regulatory frameworks must provide clear, non-retroactive rules regarding data ownership, and the implementation of multi-homing and interoperability is expected to foster new business models such as subscription services or secondary reservation markets.
- The convergence of facial recognition and data concentration is predicted to expand surveillance capabilities for both government and private entities, and while the GDPR is not expected to be overturned, compliance costs are anticipated to be particularly burdensome for American small-to-medium-sized websites.