Competition in the Digital Age
Prairie Home Companion begins with a mischievous maxim that all children in Lake Wobegon are above average. The equivalent adage in Silicon Valley goes like this: Every insider acts like an outsider. This adage reflects mythology as well as savvy public relations. The largest technology firms possess names recognized in most households, and they perceive …
AT&T and Time Warner want to merge. They don't really operate in the same market -- AT&T is a distributor (specifically through wireless and Direct TV) while Time Warner has content -- notably HBO, CNN and its Warner movie releases. The DOJ have a straightforward vertical merger concern: that the new entity will use its …
Continue reading "Two key assumptions in the DOJ challenge to AT&T and Time Warner"
It is not even close. In this view (#expressyourunpopularopinion), I know that I find no agreement amongst my economist colleagues. Facebook is generally perceived to be a monopolist in something called the 'social network market.' The latest discussion of that comes in the Financial Times from Tim Harford. I rarely find myself in disagreement with …
Continue reading "Facebook DOES NOT have a monopoly on the news"
In the New York Times, Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik are proposing to pre-emptively deal with market power issues arising from the likes of Google and Facebook by advocating for social graph portability. Rather than use price regulation or antitrust, the propose a reallocation of property rights. As they note, this has happened before: [I]n …
I participated at an interesting panel at an antitrust conference in Brussels today. I was about big data and whether it will be a problem for competition policy. This is something that has been widely discussed but there is little resolution on the issue. When it comes to the potential problems that arise from big …
Kayne West has a new album. I would say 'out' except that it is only available on Tidal, a music service owned by Jay Z and other artists. Up until now, the artist owners have released their work on the usual variety of platforms. But last night that changed when West tweeted that his new …
One of the things I have been saying about disruption is that when it potentially arises what potentially disrupted incumbents will try and do is acquire the disruptive entrant rather than be disrupted by them. Consequently, incumbents have an important tool in their arsenal that can be deployed if they face existent threats. This was …
Just a decade or so since the music industry was disrupted by the digital world, it is well into another business model disruption over streaming. And like that previous disruption, it seems that artists are wondering where all the money is going. This was the topic of David Byrne's New York Times opinion piece this …
Continue reading "Is Apple at antitrust risk from music streaming?"
[This post was first published at HBR.org on 10th July 2015]. Why aren’t things better? This is something that I often feel these days when searching for information on the internet. And it is especially something I feel when I am searching for products where quality matters. This applies to restaurants, tradespeople, and books, for …
Last week I presented at the Lear Antitrust 2.0 conference in Rome. While there was no specific agenda beyond thinking about search and advertising, much of the discussion centred around Google's travails as EU Competition Authorities investigate its Google Shopping results (yes, really) and its dominance in Android. It was clear from the presentations by …
Digitopoly 