Antitrust Writing Awards 2020 – auch eine praktische Sammlung weiterlesen
Alle Beiträge von Markus Saurer
Big Tech and the Parable of the Broken Window
(Truth on the Market – Reblog)
Corbin K. Barthold
4 August 2020
A boy throws a brick through a bakeshop window. He flees and is never identified. The townspeople gather around the broken glass. “Well,” one of them says to the furious baker, “at least this will generate some business for the windowmaker!”
A reasonable statement? Not really. Although it is indeed a good day for the windowmaker, the money for the new window comes from the baker. Perhaps the baker was planning to use that money to buy a new suit. Now, instead of owning a window and a suit, he owns only a window. The windowmaker’s gain, meanwhile, is simply the tailor’s loss.
This parable of the broken window was conceived by Frédéric Bastiat, a nineteenth-century French economist. He wanted to alert the reader to the importance of opportunity costs—in his words, “that which is not seen.” Time and money spent on one activity cannot be spent on another.
Today Bastiat might tell the parable of the harassed technology company. A tech firm creates a revolutionary new product or service and grows very large. Rivals, lawyers, activists, and politicians call for an antitrust probe. Eventually they get their way. Millions of documents are produced, dozens of depositions are taken, and several hearings are held. In the end no concrete action is taken. “Well,” the critics say, “at least other companies could grow while the firm was sidetracked by the investigation!”
Consider the antitrust case against Microsoft twenty years ago. The case ultimately settled, and Microsoft agreed merely to modify minor aspects of how it sold its products. “It’s worth wondering,” writes Brian McCullough, a generally astute historian of the internet, “how much the flowering of the dot-com era was enabled by the fact that the most dominant, rapacious player in the industry was distracted while the new era was taking shape.” “It’s easy to see,” McCullough says, “that the antitrust trial hobbled Microsoft strategically, and maybe even creatively.”
Lesen Sie hier weiter: Big Tech and the Parable of the Broken Window
Kaum europäische Einhörner (IREF-Reblog)
Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb – die Liste ließe sich weiterführen. Diese und viele andere Unternehmen haben in den vergangenen Jahren mit neuen Technologien unser Leben tiefgreifend verändert. Die Geschäftsmodelle sind verschieden, doch die großen Stars haben eines gemeinsam: Sie kommen nicht aus Europa. In Deutschland gibt es mit SAP nur einen großen digitalen Konzern, wenn man von den Seriengründern bei Rocket Internet in Berlin absieht. Kommt der EU eine Rolle bei dem Versuch zu, das zu ändern? Ja, allerdings nicht mithilfe neuer Subventionen und detailreicher Regulierungen, sondern mit einer EU-Kernkompetenz: Märkte offen halten.
Bitte lesen Sie hier weiter.
Durch Regulierung der Tech Giganten in bestehenden, meist zu eng definierten relevanten Märkten, entstehen nicht Einhörner, sondern ineffiziente „Wettbewerber“, die ohne regulatorische Hilfe nicht überleben können.
