Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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âThe rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterdayâââbut never jam to-day.â
-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)
The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giantsâ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.
Competition regulators in the EU, the UK and the US are all looking hard at concentration in the tech sector, and well they should: an industry that was once hailed for its dynamismâââfor being a sector where yesterdayâs world-spanning titans are sold for parts to companies that were mere napkin doodles a year or two beforeâââhas calcified into âa group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.â
The reasons for tech concentration are pretty straightforward. Despite a lot of fatalistic tech exceptionalism about ânetwork effectsâ leading to inevitable monopolization, the actual means by which tech companies consolidated is actually easy to see in the historical record.
Continue reading "The EU, Tech Trustbusting, and Trade Wars"