antitrust Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

Over at TheAtlantic.com, Justin Fox offers thoughts on how antitrust policy will impact social media companies going forward. The article is worthwhile reading, in part for what it reveals about the smug sense of entitlement policymakers exhibit when it comes to America’s most successful companies.

“The Web’s New Monopolists” floats a number of trial balloons, including:

• The desirability of regulating companies like Twitter and Facebook as “utilities”
• Whether Internet giants such as these, not to mention Apple, Amazon, and Google, should be seen as “scary monopolies that somebody needs to do something about”
• Whether a company like Facebook should be nationalized
• Whether “it’s possible to spin a credible tale of antitrust lawyers enabling disruption and innovation” through enforcement measures such as those against Microsoft in the 1990s.

What’s on display here is the idea that the more success a company earns, the more it must put up with coercive control over its business practices. Fox’s conclusion says it all:

So all praise to today’s would-be utilities and monopolies, as they try to build enterprises that own their markets and that we can’t do without. But when they actually succeed, don’t think we shouldn’t be sniffing around in their business. At a certain point, it becomes our business, too.

Unfortunately, the businessmen subjected to antitrust enforcement typically accept it as a cost of doing business. “There’s a joke in Silicon Valley,” says UC Berkeley economist Carl Shaprio. “‘You know you’ve really made it when you’ve got antitrust problems.’ That’s the sign of success.”

Notably, Fox’s article contains not a single quote or mention of anyone—businessman, academic, or policy analyst—who opposes antitrust regulation of Internet companies on principle.

(This is cross-posted from Voices for Reason.)

Image: Cliff via Compfight

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Tom Bowden, who does an incredible job editing most of the posts you see on the blog, has a terrific op-ed in Investor’s Business Daily. The subject: the antitrust assault on Google.

How do the world’s most powerful governments get away with treating Google like a villain? After all, this is a company that has built a reputation for improving people’s lives in a thousand ways.

Just ask the millions of visitors who type keywords into Google’s legendary search engine, or who use the many other services — email, maps, videos, travel arrangements, comparison shopping, books, and the like — that Google offers for free. Yes, for free.

The answer lies buried in the unavoidable vagaries of antitrust law — an irrational regime that grants competitive grumblings the exalted status of legal injuries, then empowers government enforcers to override market outcomes.

Whole thing here.

Tom Bowden has been raining hellfire upon antitrust over at Voice for Reason. His latest, on Cablevision’s suit against Viacom, is particularly worth reading:

In the topsy-turvy world of antitrust, what’s coercive is deemed voluntary, and what’s voluntary is deemed coercive. A while back, for example, I pointed out that it’s wrong to call Google’s action “voluntary” when it’s changing business practices in response to threats from the Federal Trade Commission.

Now here’s the opposite error, arising out of an antitrust suit by Cablevision against Viacom.

Whole thing here.