Name: Competitive Compatibility: Year in Review 2020
Brand: eff.org
SKU: eff-org-398
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Competitive Compatibility: Year in Review 2020

preview

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare It2020 saw on take action against the dominance of the biggest tech platforms, with a flurry of pro-competition rules, investigations and lawsuits. As exciting as this is, it's just the beginning. Antitrust enforcement is often a matter of years or even decades, and if history is any judge, dominant companies will seek to avert precedent-setting judgments (which might lead to breakups) and instead try to settle their lawsuits, negotiating concessions rather than taking their chances before a judge.As an organization that yearns for the days we are excited to see this kind of enforcement underway, but that excitement is tempered by the fear that hasty, reflexive settlements and regulations might actually make the situation worse. For example, deputizing companies to perform the duties of the state by identifying and blocking unlawful speech makes it harder for new, better companies to enter the marketplace, because they can't afford the vast army of moderators that monopolists can pay for with the change they find down the back of the sofa in their campus mini-kitchens.Thankfully, 2020 saw some very thoughtful approaches to competition that explicitly sought out ways to promote competition and give users more power over how their tech works, rather than blindly "punishing" companies with regulations that also raise barriers for would-be challengers. Both the U.S. and the EU propose interoperability mandates—a requirement that the biggest tech companies provide managed access to their systems for startups, co-ops, and other potential competitors.When it comes to undoing 40 years of indifferent antitrust enforcement, interoperability mandates are a great start, but they are only part of the solution. What happens if the mandatory system is sidelined by changing market conditions or deliberate subversion by monopolistic companies? And what about new technologies just a-borning: what can we do to prevent them from growing into monopolies, and starting the cycle over again?There are lots of ways in which tech monopolies are unexceptional: just like , their growth was fueled by access to lots of capital, which allowed them to before they could grow to be competitors; they engaged in mergers between notional competitors, making it harder for suppliers, customers, and workers to shop around for better deals; and they created that cornered multiple markets.But tech is exceptional, because it is based on universal machines (computers) and a universal network (the Internet), and that opens up the possibility of a different kind of interoperability—not the kind that is designed in from the start through standards, nor the kind imposed by a lawmaker.Rather, this is adversarial interoperability, when you plug something in against the wishes of the person who made it, to make life better for the people who use it.We have a name for this: Competitive Compatibility (ComCom for short).ComCom is deeply embedded in the history of tech. Every one of today's tech giants has a ComCom story in its history, like to Microsoft's unreliable Office for Mac products.But as scrappy firms become powerful incumbents, their relationship to ComCom changes: when they were using ComCom to outmaneuver the lumbering dinosaurs of a previous era, that was just “progress.” When some upstart comes along to do the same to them, that's a dangerous and illegitimate challenge to the natural order of things.When it comes to getting their own way, monopolies have two major advantages: first, they have the extra profits that come from monopolization ("monopoly rents" in economics jargon); and second, the more concentrated an industry is, the easier it is for all the major companies in it to collude to spend those monopoly rents to buy policies that safeguard their profits.For decades, the pirates of yore have declared themselves to be admirals and have set about ensuring that no one does unto them what they have done unto so many others. To that end, we've seen the steady expansion of , , and (as well as that make it much harder to use ComCom to help users escape walled gardens, lock-ins, and other anti-competitive tricks that help monopolists do monopoly.)We spent much of 2019 and 2020 in tech development, from all the way to .Now it's time to mobilize. As 2021's crackdowns on monopoly proceed, lawmakers, courts, and regulators will be looking for solutions. We think ComCom should be in their toolkits: we imagine courts correcting monopoly abuses by prohibiting big companies from using legal tools to fight ComCom, and governments insisting on guarantees that ComCom will be tolerated by anyone selling products to the public sector. We’d also like to see legislatures adopt rules to promote ComCom, including reforms to copyright, cybersecurity, patent, and other laws that safeguard those who make new things that connect the old.It's nearly 2021, and long past time for a revival of the trustbusting spirit. But it's also been 130 years since America's seminal antitrust laws were passed, and so it's also long past time to adopt some new tactics to fight the eternal problem of monopoly abuse.This article is part of our Year in Review series..Share ItIn response to the very real pressures that online news outlets are facing, Congress continues to believe the very flawed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) is a magic solution. It is not. In fact, it is actively dangerous. And there’s a available....In May, Senators Mike Lee, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Richard Blumenthal introduced the “.” The bill, also called the “Digital Advertising Act” or just “DAA” for short, is an ambitious attempt to regulate, and even break up, the biggest online advertising companies...Westlaw, the world’s largest legal research service, is very likely to face antitrust liability. A federal court has ruled that ROSS Intelligence, a tiny rival offering new research tools (which Westlaw forced out of business with a copyright infringement suit) could proceed with claims that Westlaw uses exclusionary and anticompetitive...In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...The California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee will soon be the first to consider new and terrible amendments to Assemblymember Quirk-Silva’s A.B. 2749—which is backed by AT&amp;T and other telecommunications interests. The legislation would prohibit the state from implementing affordable broadband rules for broadband companies receiving state subsidies as...The state of California is primed to bring 21st-century fiber access at affordable rates to every Californian. Last year’s means every California community has the resources available to chart a long-term course toward building fiber networks. The Department...There is a lot to appreciate in the recently published “Notice of Funding Opportunity” (NOFO) by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA). It is arguably the first federal government proposal that seeks to promote infrastructure policies focused on the future, rather than the usual subsidizing “good enough...Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation...The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a proposal for bringing competition and fairness back to online platform markets. It just cleared a major hurdle on the way to becoming law in the EU as the European Parliament and the Council, representing the member states, reached a ...The European Union’s (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage). Interoperability is an to promote competition and prevent monopolists from shutting down user-empowering innovation. But...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare It2020 saw on take action against the dominance of the biggest tech platforms, with a flurry of pro-competition rules, investigations and lawsuits. As exciting as this is, it's just the beginning. Antitrust enforcement is often a matter of years or even decades, and if history is any judge, dominant companies will seek to avert precedent-setting judgments (which might lead to breakups) and instead try to settle their lawsuits, negotiating concessions rather than taking their chances before a judge.As an organization...

public

Author, journalist, activist. My latest is ATTACK SURFACE http://attacksurface.com Books: http://craphound.com Blog: http://pluralistic.net.

Cory Doctorow

We're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We defend your civil liberties in a digital world.

Competitive Compatibility: Year in Review 2020

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS