Nov 2, 2020 · 40m · another-podcast
How do you destroy a tech monopoly?
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Hosts Benedict Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown analyze the complexities of Big Tech antitrust regulation, contrasting US and European regulatory philosophies while explaining why simplistic corporate breakups fail against network-driven natural monopolies. They argue that effective technology governance requires nuanced product theories, mechanistic access remedies, and an understanding of generational industry paradigm shifts.
Statements from this episode (15)
Evans: Microsoft's calls to regulate Google are self-serving
“One of them is of course that when Microsoft says that you should regulate Google, they're being tremendously self-serving. When Microsoft says, ah, regulation had a big effect on us and you should do it to Google now. You can't just take that at face value as…”
Evans: Only 100 million PCs existed globally when Netscape launched
“There were only maybe a hundred million PCs on earth when Netscape launched.”
Evans: 1990s antitrust intervention against Microsoft had no effect
“And actually none of the antitrust intervention had any effect, but that's again a separate conversation”
Evans: Tech competition and privacy goals are often in direct conflict
“Now, a really obvious one that you see in technology is we want more competition, and we also want more privacy. Okay, so you want to make a new social network, then the obvious competitive tool would be export your friend list and everything they're intereste…”
Cowan-Brown: Pre-tech antitrust regulations are obsolete for software monopolies
“Most of the antitrust and competition regulations were designed, sorry, in a pre-tech era, so they're somewhat obsolete today, and these tech companies just don't look anything like the traditional monopolies that we were used to, and so there's something ther…”
Evans: Splitting YouTube from Google would not spark video competition
“Today, if you split YouTube into a separate company, that wouldn't result in 10 new social media video sharing sites exploding.”
Evans: Amazon holds 40% of US e-commerce, but 15% of retail
“Amazon has probably 40% of US e-commerce, but e-commerce is sort of 15 to 20% of US retail.”
Evans: Apple captures over 75% of global smartphone industry profit
“Apple sells from memory sort of 10 or 15% of all the mobile phones on Earth. They sell, however, they have probably over 50% of the revenue and probably three quarters or more of the profit. They have 25% of the install base.”
Evans: Tech monopolies fall when industry paradigm shifts bypass them
“Controlling Windows doesn't give them dominance of the tech industry, and so what happens is, like, and it's the analogy that I use here, you've built your castle, and it's absolutely impregnable, and sometimes people capture your castle like they Tunnel under…”
Evans: A DOJ antitrust win against Google Search will have little effect
“And I think this is the problem with the DOJ's case on search distribution, which is even if they win, it's not really going to have much effect.
Because it's, A, it's not actually getting at the levers of power.
It's quite a long way away from the actual sear…”
Evans: Broad omnibus tech regulations like the EU's DSA cannot work
“The alternative is the Digital Services Act, which just tries to define, like, the entirety of the tech industry.
As being covered by a standardized set of rules, and it just doesn't really work.
I mean, trying to cover how Amazon treats its suppliers, it's at…”
Evans: US antitrust punishes lawbreaking while Europe engineers market competition
“US regulation tends to proceed in criminal cases. They tend to look, they tend to say, did you break the Sherman Antitrust Act of 16, 21, or whenever the hell they passed it? And yes or no, and if yes, then we will do this thing. And 20 years ago, they tried t…”
Evans: American cultural dominance over global internet regulation is over
“The first 25 years of the consumer internet was basically American, and the big companies, you know, the agenda, and therefore the kind of the cultural attitudes and the legal attitudes to how they should work were all American.
And you can, again, you can gen…”
Evans: Heavy platform regulation protects incumbents like Facebook from startups
“Part of the point of regulation is that it's expensive and it helps incumbents.
You know, if you, Facebook has whatever it is, 30, 40,000 human moderators. If you create a law that says if you have a social network, a human being has to look at every post, wel…”
Evans: Tech regulation needs a concrete product theory, not just legal theory
“I think the challenge here is, like, and I phrase this another way, that you kind of need to have a theory of, you know, competition law, or privacy law, or speech law, or something, and then you need to have, you know, a theory of harm. What is the problem th…”