After a year of convening smaller targeted meetings in Silicon Valley, INET’s Center for Innovation, Growth and Society held its first conference on February 5th, 2019. Entitled “Too Deep to Fail: Big Tech and Civil Society” the gathering brought together economists, legal scholars and tech leaders to explore increasing levels of economic concentration, in particular in the tech sector.
“With new concerns over technology platforms arising at an increasing rate, it is essential that technologists, regulators, legal scholars, economists, and consumer advocates have an impartial place to work constructively towards better solutions. CIGS and INET were happy that we were in a position to meet that need and the response of the various communities was better than we could have hoped for” said Pia Malaney the Center’s director who led the meeting for CIGS/INET.
Rising levels of inequality, threats to free speech and even the political fabric of our democracy have been laid at the doorstep of tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. While there have been increasing calls for regulation it has been pointed out by legal scholar Lina Khan that traditional antitrust regulations are focused on competition as seen in traditional markets, using the standard of “price competition” to determine monopoly power. What does this mean when the “price” on some of these products, e.g. search, are set at zero but the anti-competitive practices take place in a different area? There is a clear need to rethink our regulatory structures to address the changing nature of economic concentration in firms that span different markets, where monopoly power may one product may be used to drive traffic to a different product.
The conference highlighted the need for collaboration between Society, Tech, Academia and Regulation (STAR) in order to effectively address the social, political and economic ramifications of economic concentration in an industry often characterized by increasing returns to scale.