Experts talk antitrust in technology at symposium

The Department of Economics hosted a symposium at Taper Hall Tuesday evening to discuss GAFAM — the five Big Tech companies dominating the market: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft — and the role of antitrust law in the industry. 

Leading experts from a variety of industries spoke at the event, including Fabien Curto Millet, director of economics at Google; Brijesh Pinto, assistant professor of economics of the practice of economics at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Ziyi Qiu, adjunct professor of law and adjunct assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Daniel Sokol, Carolyn Craig Franklin Chair in Law at the Gould School of Law and affiliate professor of business at the Marshall School of Business. Abraham Solovy, student -alumni liaison and former vice president of the Economics Association, moderated the event.

Panelists first discussed the areas in digital platform competition and regulation that require rethinking.

“There are two dimensions along which to think about this,” Sokol said. “The first thing is: What are the goals of antitrust? [Second thing:] What should the standard of evaluation be — consumer welfare or something else? I think there’s a little regulatory uncertainty about that.”

Pinto said he does not necessarily view the current situation as “a race between regulators and firms,” instead laying the responsibility on an “academic gap issue.”

“How do we think about things like the complexity of transactions you see in tech? How do you think about data and how it should be valued? There’s almost a sort of barter-like system, where you’re exchanging service for data,” Pinto said. “This discussion we’re having today is a bit of the microcosm of the conversation that we need to have with stakeholders from academia, industry and also [federal] agencies.”

Sokol said the pattern of the two-sided market — which he credited as conceptualized by 19th-century Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk — was not new, but rather appearing and reappearing through the years under different names. What is new, however, is the emergence of data as a driving force for monopoly.

“We’re getting all kinds of data. Data in many ways has become like carbon dioxide: We breathe it in, we breathe it out,” Sokol said. “The concern is few-fold: Number one, from an antitrust perspective, the concern is that the law has become too lenient to larger firms. Number two, the concern is maybe we focus too much on static effects, not dynamic effects. Number three, we are concerned that these cases go on for too long.”

Solovy also asked panelists to compare digital platform regulation with that of traditional industries, and to discuss the lessons to be learned from the latter.

“Digital platform is an industry that is very sensitive to innovation,” Qiu said. “Even for firms that are competing today, you will see [they carry] different business models, and their business model is not stable. It’s changing. It’s evolving over time.”

Millet, from Google, said that despite narratives that antitrust efforts have thus far failed, regulation remains important.

“We need regulation,” Millet said. “I mean, the regulation is now around the corner. And I do not want to contest this kind of move order. Societies decide how these things go. And us in private companies, we are here to ensure compliance, really, with the frameworks that are imposed upon us. But nevertheless, the justification towards regulation does raise some questions in my mind.”