![]() ![]() It’s the subtext of any politician saying “it’s time to break up Big Tech!” This is the kind of antitrust you see in the American Innovation Act and the Choice Online Act, that latter due to be marked up in the Senate this week, and which would limit the ways big tech platforms use their own services to prevent competition. Even when services are cheap or free, they can negatively affect the overall quality of services available, or consumer choice, or our privacy rights. Our futures are increasingly controlled by a small handful of giants. The second kind of antitrust thinking is broad and free-floating. It’s the kind of antitrust you see in the recently restored federal lawsuit against Meta, for example. It’s the more limited approach to antitrust, popular over the past two decades, that frowns on enforcement actions against companies unless they can be shown to increase prices for consumers. The first is narrow and legalistic, focused on core antitrust concepts like market size, definition, and barriers to entry. Endgaem cloudplay plus#Department of Justice that shows the true power and machinations of Big Tech, plus the tandem U.S./EU actions aimed to chip away at Facebook’s and Google’s dominance in advertising, and Amazon’s dominance in … well, everything.įor this post I’ll simply focus on Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.īefore we get to the wickedly brilliant strategic move by Microsoft, let’s talk antitrust. There are two kinds of antitrust thinking that you see running through conversations about reining in big tech platforms. Senate, the recently unredacted lawsuit against Google by the U.S. That’s where I’ll look at the fast-moving tech regulation bills in the U.S. It is why in my upcoming monograph on regulating technology in the modern world I say the regulatory state must be examined through the lens of the reconstruction of the political economy: the ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one. Because politics is about who gets what, from whom, under what conditions, and for what purpose. And so, in the end, technology, as a bringer of change, is about politics. ![]() And, by definition, change can turn the world upside down. We saw tech solely as consumers, rather than as citizens, and we should have been applying the same civic scrutiny that we would bring to any other form of power. We never looked at (or maybe just ignored) the societal consequences or the potential downsides. It was right there in our faces: technological development (although not all of it) that contributed to consumer demand in increasingly sophisticated ways. We were thrown into a pessimistic future: a tiered system of information haves and have-nots a growth in new and better technologies of global surveillance a system where rights appear to belong to information and those who collect it rather than to individuals, amidst wider projects of ad hoc geo-engineering and the global diffusion of advanced weapons and other forms of technologically enabled instability. It was a promise of greater equality, greater efficiency, greater speed and greater creativity – all enabled by technologies like three-dimensional printers, ubiquitous computing and advances like virtual reality.īut things changed. Technology would allow individuals to be healthier, wealthier, more tightly connected to one another, better informed and more able to communicate, share information and collaborate. The whole “logic” of how we now communicate is not one that a representative democracy is based on, and technology is increasingly causing a disconnect between our traditional democratic system and our modern lifestyles. That’s an idealistic vision of how that should work but the argument continues that digital technology does not help us to achieve that at all because it’s all based on immediate, emotional, aggressive, snappy, short messaging. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard demonstrates what I mean.Ģ0 January 2022 (Paris, France) – There is a common argument that representative democracy has survived the rise and fall of empires but many digital technologies don’t adhere to the laws, systems or norms that traditionally underpin representative democracies. For a democracy to work reasonably well, citizens have to have the ability to know what they really think about things, to reflect carefully on complex decisions and to engage constructively and meaningfully with each other to find compromises over situations. It occurs to me that the term “metaverse” has a lot in common with “information superhighway”, both in the sense of a single unified system, and in the creation of a term well in advance of any actual product. ![]()
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