tech regulation Archives - Tech Law Decoded

Making sense of the sweeping antitrust reform bills in Congress

June 25, 2021June 28, 2021 Kaj RozgaLeave a comment

Those tracking tech policy and regulation would be forgiven for asking: is there something in the water in the nation’s Capitol? In the first half of 2021, U.S. lawmakers have proposed a staggering nine bills–six in the House of Representatives and three in the Senate–to reform federal antitrust laws and supplement them with regulatory backstops.

This comes on top of efforts to reform state laws (for example, New York is considering a major revamp of its antitrust law¹), the impact of a change in the composition of the Federal Trade Commission under a new Presidential administration (including the appointment of a progressive antitrust reformer as its Chair)², and a bevy of massive antitrust lawsuits filed by federal and state officials against the largest companies in the world that go to the core of vertically integrated business models in consumer-facing tech markets (more on that here and here).

How to make sense of the laws being proposed in Congress and fit them into the broader U.S. and worldwide context of antitrust enforcement and policy debates surrounding market concentration?

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Reining in Consumer Big Tech: Antitrust and Beyond

November 18, 2020December 14, 2020 Kaj RozgaLeave a comment

The U.S. House of Representatives recently released a long-anticipated report on the state of antitrust in consumer tech. It found that key gateways and highways online are heavily consolidated around a few Consumer Big Tech giants and that reforms of antitrust laws are needed to inject more competition into the internet.

But while the report’s recommendations are ambitious, they are not enough to take on all of the harmful effects to our culture, economy, and politics caused by consolidated consumer tech markets. One reason is that they do not tackle the law’s foundational shortcomings, which overly complicate the antitrust analysis and must be reformed. The other reason goes to the core of what modern competition laws are and what they are not, which requires looking beyond antitrust to other rules and regulations to rein in the broader societal consequences of bigness in the digital economy.

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How tech forces a reckoning with prediction-based antitrust enforcement

August 31, 2020March 28, 2021 Kaj RozgaLeave a comment

Tech is testing the limits of a half-century experiment in antitrust in which predictions made by experts have guided enforcement of the law.

Over that time, it has become increasingly common for the lawfulness of a given merger or monopolist’s conduct to be decided by predicting its actual effects on competition. On first blush, it seems a sensible approach. Ostensibly, it is a rational replacement of what came before it, which was a set of hard-and-fast rules that trained antitrust on the protection of market conditions believed conducive to competitive outcomes, with less regard for how competition was actually impacted in an individual case.

But lawyers and economists may have jumped the gun in thinking themselves up to the task. A half decade of experience with the predictive approach to antitrust, bolstered by research in uncertainty and decision-making in other fields, suggests that little more than wishful thinking may support the premise that predictions about complex markets can be accurate enough to guide competition policy. And to make matters worse, the prediction-making apparatus has been focused exclusively on an overly restrictive subset of competition concerns that only serve to help consumers to buy more things for less money. The result has been the consolidation of large swaths of the economy.

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What an elusive remedy in the Google Shopping case says about the future of regulating big tech

May 7, 2020September 11, 2020 Kaj RozgaLeave a comment

The absence of an effective remedy in Europe’s seminal Google Shopping case nearly three years since the decision reveals much about the limits of antitrust laws and the need for a new frontier in tech regulation.

While the European Commission and Google fight it out on appeal over whether the company violated antitrust laws by using Google Search to promote its own comparison shopping service, a debate outside the courtroom focuses on the appropriate remedy in the case. The relief to date is not working the way it was expected to, raising serious questions about the underlying theory of the case and the limits of competition laws. Much is at stake as the rest of the world watches to see whether Europe’s quagmire means that antitrust laws need to be pushed further in order to deal with digital platforms, or if their limits reveal the need for new forms of tech regulation.

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Coronavirus and tech regulation in a new normal

March 28, 2020April 18, 2020 Kaj RozgaLeave a comment

Two month ago, plans to ramp up regulation of the digital economy under competition, privacy, and consumer protection laws looked like a head-first dive into the deep end of the pool. Now, as governments focus on keeping people safe and markets stable, a spotlight has been cast on the role of technology in our lives and economies. What might the coronavirus crisis mean for the future of tech regulation when restrictions subside and a new normal emerges?

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