No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Big Tech’s Buying Spree and the Failed Ideology of Competition Law: The Example of Facebook
... Subcommittee on Antitrust, 2020; see Baer et al., 2020;DOJ, 2021;Klobuchar, 2021;Petit, 2020. 94 Cp. Glick et al., 2020;Subcommittee on Antitrust, 2020;Washington Post, 2021. 95 Cp. ...
... The reason is that such a "merger-plus-shutdown" does not yield any efficiencies-to the contrary, it harms consumer welfare. 111 Cp.Furman et al., 2019;Glick et al., 2020. Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
The past few years have seen the opening of several antitrust investigations against some of the most dominant and powerful companies in the world—e.g., the U.S. Department of Justice, numerous states, and the Federal Trade Commission have sued Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and the E.U. has launched additional proceedings against Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. This paper looks at the latest trends and developments in the E.U. and the USA and analyzes the different regulatory approaches taken from a distinct business ethics, that is, ordoliberal perspective. The paper aims to derive ordoliberal-inspired antitrust principles and apply them to the current antitrust proceedings and investigations, thereby assessing their strengths and weaknesses. It also aims at developing ordoliberal-inspired reform proposals which might help to strengthen and “harden” modern-day antitrust regimes.
... The company has access to the best researchers, including great talents such as Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman. One benefit of accessing great talent and innovation is that Google significantly reduced energy consumption [6]. The element led to reduced costs and thus improved revenues. ...
This paper explores the issue of MA as it pertains to Supply chain elements such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the role of technology, and supply chain efficiency. By exploring the issue further, the research seeks to assess the recent trend of increased mergers and acquisitions (MA) and how the activities affect the supply chain management (SCM) role. The results are important in understanding current trends in SCM when it comes to mergers and acquisitions. The discussion covered the role that COVID-19 played in increased trends in MA and technology's role in MA activities and success. The ultimate goal is to understand how technology and COVID-19 impact MA activities and how, in turn, the supply chain management role gets affected.
... 114 Cp. Furman et al., 2019;Glick et al., 2020. ...
... 47 According to the Commission 'Competition Law 4.0' (2019), new guidelines are also needed for start-up acquisitions by dominant digital companies. Those guidelines should specify the relevant theories of harm, e.g., conglomerate, data-based, or innovation-based theories of harm.48 Glick et al. (2020) argue in favor of 'new' U.S. merger guidelines, that is, a return to the 1968 Merger Guidelines and the abolition of the Chicago School-inspired 'potential competition doctrine' -which makes it unnecessarily hard to challenge big tech acquisitions. 49 The Furman Report recommends updating the Merger Assessment Guidelines of the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA): The new guidelines should make use of the so-called balance of harms approach -which considers the scale and likelihood of harm in merger cases -and tolerate 'some false positives' to avoid 'some false negatives'; lastly, it should make use of the transaction value test and review all M&As above a particular value (cp.Furman et al., 2019). ...
The debate surrounding ‘big tech’ and antitrust has dominated public policy discourses over the past few years in many parts of the world. Noteworthy is that several countries and regions, including China, the European Union, and the United States, have launched investigations into the allegedly anticompetitive and exclusionary business practices of companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google and their Chinese counterparts, Alibaba and Tencent. This paper builds on the renewed interest in the topic and discusses in detail – and from an ordoliberal perspective – the key characteristics of the digital economy, the business conduct of tech platforms, and the corresponding antitrust concerns, as well as possible reform steps which could help to strengthen modern-day competition law and policy (and antitrust enforcement).
Considering intangibles not simply as the output of a genius or artificial intelligence (AI) from the cloud but as the output of the triad of labour, data and resources, the authors argue against the perception of the digital economy as mainly driven by intangibles and instead focus on its implications for profit attribution and profit determination within transfer pricing. The potential negative impacts, such as inequalities and a monopoly-driven innovation blockade, resulting from a potential overvaluation emphasize the need for further research. The main implication for international tax law and the discussion for its nexus is that even for an AI you might require a physical presence in the form of labour, data and resources.
The debate around ‘big tech’ and competition law and policy has gained traction over the past few years – not least because of the various ongoing antitrust investigations in China, Europe, and the U.S. This paper builds on the renewed interest in the topic and discusses the key characteristics of digital markets, the business models and strategies of major tech platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, and the corresponding antitrust issues. It does so by utilizing a distinct business ethics perspective, i.e., ordoliberalism. By doing so, the paper not only aims to enrich the current debate on big tech and antitrust; it also intends to illustrate the continuing relevance and importance of ‘German neoliberalism’ in the 21st century.
The paper analyzes the challenges faced by competition authorities with respect to the digital sector. Borrowing insights from the business policy literature and from the economic literature, the paper first analyzes the specificities of digital firms (multi-sided platforms and ecosystems) with respect to their development and competitive strategies. Building on this foundation the paper explores some of the challenges of applying traditional competition analysis to competition in the business sector. We then discuss a number of issues relevant to competition law enforcement in the digital sector starting with the role of data, competition within ecosystems and between ecosystems, consumer biases, and the role of gatekeepers. We conclude with a research agenda for economists and competition authorities.
Despite being the prevailing wisdom, consumer welfare antitrust rests on a bed of nonsense. First, consumer welfare antitrust is built on false history and a rewriting of legislative intent. Second, it relies on a false conception of the market and submerges the state construction of the economy. Third, it depends on, and is informed by, false assumptions about business conduct. While the third falsehood suggests an analytical renovation and better antitrust economics are sorely needed, the first two falsehoods show that empirical improvements are necessary but not enough. These falsehoods together mean that the entire enterprise at present is built on a bed of sand and that a fundamental reconstruction of antitrust is required. An antitrust that promotes an equitable economy and protects democratic institution will be true to legislative intent, recognize the state construction of the marketplace, and informed by empiricism.
The structural presumption against mergers in highly concentrated markets has had a controversial history. The debate has centered on the error rates – and especially, the rate of false positives – from reliance on a simple structural standard for presuming a merger to be anticompetitive. This article introduces the first systematic evidence into that debate. It also uses that evidence to examine the empirical validity of the so-called “safe harbor”–the range of concentration where mergers are presumed unlikely to harm competition. The evidence is based on a substantial compilation of carefully studied mergers whose competitive outcomes are matched to data on concentration, the change in concentration due to the merger, and the number of remaining significant competitors after each merger. Statistical tests confirm that the current threshold in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines correctly identifies anticompetitive mergers with a high degree of accuracy, as indeed would somewhat tighter standards. Corollary findings include indications that a count of remaining significant competitors produces a slightly higher rate of correct predictions, and that the concentration-based safe harbor is at best rough guidance since there are any number of anticompetitive mergers in that zone. Data on recent merger enforcement practice are contrasted with these findings.
The characteristics of identity based public key cryptography (ID-PKC) are discussed. The security of this system is located in the factorization of the public modulus, which is known to the authority. This approach brings significant business benefits since it does not require any infrastructure to provide another user's public key. Moreover, there is also no need for a certificate, or associated infrastructure, to validate and tamper-proof the public keys.
"Zero-price markets," wherein firms set the price of their goods or services at $0, have exploded in quantity and variety. Creative content, software, search functions, social media platforms, mobile applications, travel booking, navigation and mapping systems, and myriad other goods and services are now widely distributed at zero prices. But despite the exponential increase in the volume of zero-price products being consumed, antitrust institutions and analysts have failed to provide an adequate response to markets without prices. Modern antitrust law is firmly grounded in neoclassical economics, which is in turn centered on price theory. Steeped in price theory, preeminent antitrust theorists have urged that without prices there can be no markets, and consequently no market power. This heavy methodological dependence on positive prices has led antitrust courts and enforcement agencies to overlook potentially massive welfare harms. Unfortunately, recent empirical research confirms that such harms have already occurred. These failures to conceive of zero-price markets as antitrust "markets" indicate how fundamentally zero prices challenge traditional theories and analytical frameworks. This Article establishes a novel taxonomy of customer-facing costs, distinguishing "market-signaling" from "non-market-signaling" costs. Crucially, it demonstrates that market-signaling costs are present in many zero-price contexts. The absence of positive prices thus does not foreclose antitrust scrutiny; "trade," for purposes of the Sherman and Clayton Acts, encompasses zero-price transactions. To continue ignoring welfare harms in these markets would be both unjust and inefficient. The Article concludes by identifying antitrust law's proper role within - and stance toward - zero-price markets.
- Chris Anderson
Social Networking Sites and Our Lives
- Keith N Hampton
- Josh Constine
- E G See