Tag: wants

Grocery stores. To take one specific case cited by Warren, how much innovation was there in the grocery store industry before Amazon bought Whole Foods? Since the acquisition, large grocery retailers, like Walmart and Kroger, have increased their investment in online services to better compete with the e-commerce champion. Many industry analysts expect grocery stores to use computer vision technology and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of check-out in the near future.

Smartphones. Imagine how forced neutrality would play out in the context of iPhones. If Apple can’t sell its own apps, it also can’t pre-install its own apps. A brand new iPhone with no apps — and even more importantly, no App Store — would be, well, just a phone, out of the box. How would users even access a site or app store from which to download independent apps? Would Apple be allowed to pre-install someone else’s apps? That’s discriminatory, too. Maybe it will be forced to offer a menu of all available apps in all categories (like the famously useless browser ballot screen demanded by the European Commission in its Microsoft antitrust case)? It’s hard to see how that benefits consumers — or even app developers.

Internet search. Or take search. Calls for “search neutrality” have been bandied about for years. But most proponents of search neutrality fail to recognize that all Google’s search results entail bias in favor of its own offerings. As Geoff Manne and Josh Wright noted in 2011 at the height of the search neutrality debate:

[S]earch engines offer up results in the form not only of typical text results, but also maps, travel information, product pages, books, social media and more. To the extent that alleged bias turns on a search engine favoring its own maps, for example, over another firm’s, the allegation fails to appreciate that text results and maps are variants of the same thing, and efforts to restrain a search engine from offering its own maps is no different than preventing it from offering its own search results.

Never mind that Google with forced non-discrimination likely means Google offering only the antiquated “ten blue links” search results page it started with in 1998 instead of the far more useful “rich” results it offers today; logically it would also mean Google somehow offering the set of links produced by any and all other search engines’ algorithms, in lieu of its own. If you think Google will continue to invest in and maintain the wealth of services it offers today on the strength of the profits derived from those search results, well, Elizabeth Warren is probably already your favorite politician.

And regulatory oversight of algorithmic content won’t just result in an impoverished digital experience; it will inevitably lead to an authoritarian one, as well, as Truth on the Market has written before:

Any agency granted a mandate to undertake such algorithmic oversight, and override or reconfigure the product of online services, thereby controls the content consumers may access…. This sort of control is deeply problematic… [because it saddles users] with a pervasive set of speech controls promulgated by the government. The history of such state censorship is one which has demonstrated strong harms to both social welfare and rule of law, and should not be emulated.

Digital assistants. Consider also the veritable cage match among the tech giants to offer “digital assistants” and “smart home” devices with ever-more features at ever-lower prices. Today the allegedly non-existent competition among these companies is played out most visibly in this multi-featured market, comprising advanced devices tightly integrated with artificial intelligence, voice recognition, advanced algorithms, and a host of services. Under Warren’s nondiscrimination principle this market disappears. Each device can offer only a connectivity platform (if such a service is even permitted to be bundled with a physical device…) — and nothing more.

But such a world entails not only the end of an entire, promising avenue of consumer-benefiting innovation, it also entails the end of a promising avenue of consumer-benefiting competition. It beggars belief that anyone thinks consumers would benefit by forcing technology companies into their own silos, ensuring that the most powerful sources of competition for each other are confined to their own fiefdoms by order of law.