Neither interoperability nor data sharing will solve transnational monopoly

Every since my awesome if brief visiting professorship at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society in 2019 I've been worrying about why some law professors believe that all data is the same, and that if we forced companies to share theirs that would somehow remedy the inequalities underlying the market dominance of tech giants right now. There are many false premises there – e.g. myth of first-mover advantage (hello IBM, hello myspace, hello Mosaic – yes there are huge network effects, but these can include sudden transitions to new winners.) But the main thing is that it shows an ignorance of the nature of computation. Computation is a physical process requiring, time, space and energy. The tech giants are now enormous global-scale infrastructure, with their own power plants, global fiber-optic networks, satellites, and so forth. 

I agree that interoperability where it is viable can be a partial solution to the problems of antitrust, but "where it is viable" is a very small part of the domain of the excesses and assaults we are seeing against antitrust regulation, even if we only focus on the digital sphere – which to be honest, I think is a mistake. Let me unpack these two thoughts.

There are a few services such as texts and email that you might be able to make fully interoperable. But even if you get to the point of thinking hard about twitter vs linkedin, you might already see the problem with interoperability. These are different platforms with different communicative goals and as such will have different ideal representations. No data system captures the entire universe, nor even the universe of human self expression. 

We should actively want our technical venders only to retain what data is necessary for their mandates (cf. the GDPR.)  And indeed even for all the talk of "the new oil", tech vendors too keep only compressed and filtered versions of all the data they see. This is because retention and transmission take time and energy. The compression and filtering is business-practice specific. Demanding data sharing by e.g. giants to SMEs is really demanding lock-in to particular business models / world views depending on which giant info-ecosystem an SME chooses to deploy within. 

Demanding that all the giants become replicas of each other is actually one thing I've thought of with respect to remedies – make big tech "airbus" each other. But I just don't think this is ecologically sound or pragmatic from a power perspective. You would then just essentially unify them into one bigger monopoly by aligning all their interests. 

The reason I think focussing only on the digital is a mistake is because in my opinion, one of the fundamental problems underlying our present situation is that we are inadequately governing and regulating all kinds of transnational entities. This includes finance, petrochemical, pharma, and consultancies. If we do something that only addresses Google and Facebook, then yes we do address a couple of the very largest bubbles of the moment – though note that interoperability of doc / ppt / xls only helped Microsoft to further power and success.* Yes, it did so via providing us with more consumer choice so I do very strongly approve of that legal decision. The goal of antitrust isn't to destroy the real economic and security value these companies provide. It's to defend further innovation and also the rule of law, hopefully via democracy.

The goal of antitrust isn't to destroy the real economic and security value these companies provide. It's to defend further innovation and also the rule of law, hopefully via democracy.

So actually, there are two problems with focussing too much on a digital-only remedy like interoperability.  First, this lets all the other sectors not being adequately addressed off the hook. I'm suspicious that part of the reason that the market caps / power of big tech have been allowed to get so out-of-control (at least in America) is because the geopolitical power of the peterostates was seen to be surprisingly resurging in the early naughts. There was back then some discussion in the newspapers that perhaps liberal democracy and capitalism couldn't really beat out autocracy coupled with resources and a strong cyber-competent mafia. Now we are hearing about discussions about how separated GAFAM should be from the White House (think for example Schmidt).

But second, Apple, Google, Facebook & Amazon at least benefit most when liberal democracy is strong – when there are many people with enough wealth, education, and freedom to use their products. So these are organisations we should be trying to bring into the fold of understanding and supporting good regulation. My model here is FDR's New Deal and also Bretton Woods. You need enough of the elite on your side to achieve such titanic changes in the regulatory order. This is why I'm personally very worried also about the DMA. We shouldn't be demonising exclusively the digital monopolies. We should be returning antitrust enforcement to its original emphasis on keeping corporations to a size that can be governed by democracies. 

So sure, where viable, make demands about interoperability, and for sure let individuals download complete sets of their own records. But don't play into the libertarian fantasies that there's some magic way that the digital economy could represent information and play nice together that would mean we don't have to remain vigilant about the state of our democracies, or that government has no real utility in an adequately transparent world. Government is a means of coordination, when we deploy it well the rest of our problems become simpler. And government is defined by a monopoly of executive force within a geographic region. There will always be at least a leader if not a complete monopoly in that regard. Let's ensure that we keep strong democratic control over ours.

One of Google's many data centre / renewable power stations (a converted non-renewables plant).
Note the (AFP) link says Amazon is the only of GAFA not showing commitment to renewables.

*note also that no one made or suggested that Microsoft should just have one format that combines xls, ppt, & doc – yet some lawyers seem to think that any startup should be able to utilise the data of any big tech company "as is."

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Update 24 Feb 2023: James Bessen has data showing that software makes monopoly more likely in every sector, not just big tech. See his book "The New Goliaths" or this 30 minute video of him talking about the data.