In a major new paper, just released as a preprint, the eminent UK computer scientist and digital rights campaigner Ian Brown makes the case for “Interoperability as a tool for competition regulation.”
The paper pulls together many of the recent interventions on the subject into a single, readable, brief summary that makes for an excellent overview - I’m not saying you shouldn’t read the CMA’s magesterial 450 page report, but realistically…
Brown starts by describing interop - an often slippery topic - in concrete terms, giving familiar examples from existing tech (eg SMS) and then describing how interop could open Big Tech’s silos up.
He summarizes leading economists’ views on the effects of interop on competition, presenting both pro- and con- arguments (the pro arguments are MUCH better, but then reality has a well-known leftist bias).
He then presents a taxonomy of types of platforms:
Gatekeepers: “control access between businesses and potential customers”
Conglomerates: “companies with a broad range of sometimes weakly-related businesses”
Ecosystems: “collections of services connected via privileged channels not fully available to competitors”
This is a jumping-off point for concepts from competition scholarship: “complementary innovation,” “homogenization,” “static vs dynamic effects” - the ways that companies interpenetrate each others’ products/services for good and ill.
Having covered the economic dimension, Brown turns to the social consequences of interop: as covid showed us, platform dominance has a profound effect on our social lives, with choices made by tech giants redounding to every facet of our digitally mediated, locked down lives.
Competition economists since Thatcher and Reagan have largely dismissed these consequences, focusing solely on short-term price increases as the only reliable barometer of whether monopolistic conduct is good or bad.
But tech concentration has profound impacts on our civil society - the BBC can’t get Amazon or Google to put its coronavirus coverage on their smart speakers, so “tech companies with their executives in the US have a monopoly in British people’s kitchens and living rooms.”
Other media orgs also complain that tech acts as a rent-seeker and gate-keeper, holding their audiences hostage (though those who succeed rarely complain on behalf of smaller, new entrants who can’t afford to pay tech’s tolls and thus do not compete with Big Content).
Next is privacy and data protection, citing some of the work I’ve done with my EFF colleague Bennett Cyphers:
This is a severely undertheorized area, and there are severe potential pitfalls if we get it wrong. One thing we know, though, is that the status quo is NOT good for privacy, and lack of competition doesn’t incentivize tech monopolists to do better.
Next, Brown turns to content moderation, an area of growing concern that regulators have primarily addressed by creating impossibly expensive mandates to prevent harmful speech, at costs that preclude new market entrants, strengthening Big Tech’s dominance.
Brown cites federated platforms like Mastodon, which allow for partial interconnetion between autonomously maintained servers, where communities can make their own policies and block/filter those with policies they disagree with.
These offer the possibility of having fine-grained locally responsive rules - enforced by the community itself, not by traumatized subcontractors in the Philippines tasked with moderating all of Facebook’s 2.6B users’ contributions.
Brown takes on “digital sovereignty” and the uneasy fact that most of the west’s online media is controlled by a handful of US-based companies with “GDP"s larger than most countries’.
Interop lets domestic competitors arise that can benefit from these US giants’ users, while returning control to local firms and regulators.
Brown ends with an appendix that enumerates types of interop and scenarios for how they could be applied to existing Big Tech firms’ services, bringing the whole thing into focus with concrete examples and proposals.
As the US Congress showed us yesterday, we’re at a turning point with our relationship to Big Tech. Smaller tech companies are experiencing a mass die-off thanks to covid, and Big Tech has huge war-chests it can use to snap them up.
When these US giants buy all their nascent competitors, they will present themselves as rescuers, saviors of businesses drowning in debt. But unless we intervene, they will emerge from the crisis with levels of dominance we can hardly dream of.
