Are Platforms Commons?
Before sweeping regulation of platforms as common carriers, should we instead reconfigure them as commons, governed by the participants?
In How Each Big Tech Company May Be Targeted by Regulators, we learn (thanks to Jack Nicas, Karen Weise, and Mike Isaac) that attorneys general in eight states are starting an antitrust investigation of Facebook, which comes as little surprise, and could be completely valid from their perspective. The company has snapped up a long list of competitors to squash competition. A forced spinout of Instagram and Whatsapp could certainly increase competition in the social media sector.
However, the arguments leveled again Apple vis-a-vis the Apple Store, Amazon’s competition with companies selling on its ecommerce platform, and Google’s algorithms for search results ranking all fall into a different category: exploiting the power of platforms. That’s a thornier mess than the Facebook social media monopoly, actually, and one of considerably broader scope.
So, we have a riddle: how are Google search results like railroad shipping rates? The answer may be that they will soon have to be ‘fair’ in the same way.
