Too Little Too Late: Updating Antitrust Law
by Miki Saxon
Last week in a post about responsibility and the difference between Microsoft and other tech giants I said that change was coming, driven in by a surprising source.
The change is to antitrust law.
The University of Chicago is the intellectual birthplace of the consensus in antitrust thinking over the last four decades — that monopoly law should place consumer interests, usually in the form of lower prices, above the concerns of smaller business rivals.
Big tech has been protected, because you can’t get lower than free, but people are waking up to the fact that free isn’t actually free.
More importantly, so is the University of Chicago and a growing list of experts.
But amid growing concerns about the unchecked power of today’s tech giants, economists and legal scholars are questioning whether the Chicago School still makes sense. Even the university’s own faculty is starting to publicly challenge the ideology.
It’s about time.
Considering how fast the world moves these days there is no excuse for those who are supposed to protect us to move at glacial speed.
At last year’s summit, Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department official in charge of antitrust, told attendees that his view of the cost of free platforms “has changed” with a greater understanding of the nature and scope of data collection and sharing.
Duh. No kidding.
Makes you wonder how the European Union figured it out so much quicker.
Or not.
Image credit: Luiz Gadelha Jr.
