Monday, April 27, 2020

BIG TECH: TOO BIG TO BREAK UP?

ABA Virtual Spring Meeting, here.

Kovacic
- "all of the remedies have side effects" 0:16:33
- lots of hybrids and blurred boundaries between structural and behavioural remedies 0:17:22 -
- in praise of the UK market investigation regime (heard already from @Vestager)
- "market power by itself" (55:36) - or going back to the roots, if I may add.
- humbling: in some instances, you don't know what the effects of the case and remedies are going to be for many years to come (decades!) (1:05:30) "I'm not sure and I'm not sure when" (1:06);
- Judge Jackson (Microsoft case) on remedies: 1 morning (1:10:02);
- "We suffered from a badly cramped and distorted debate about what consumer welfare means" (1:20:27) ;


Banasevic (*interesting*question, he repeats)
- in some instances, "the harm can materialize in such a way that there is no way back once the harm has reached a certain point" (36:50)
- not a fan of the attention market concept (50:00)
- burden of proof or standard of proof, this is the question (51:00) - academic perfection ain't the goal
- The US at times goes further than the EU (examples: Intel, Qualcomm) (1:13: 50)
- complementary regulatory agenda"- "systemic or structural issues...beyond the realm of individual, case by case antitrust enforcement" (1:14:30) -  his Commissioner sounded slightly more resolute and engaged, if I may ;-), here (1:00:48);
- "...days, weeks, and months" (1:15:26) - not YEARS, hopefully @EU_Competition;
- mentioning a "thread" from Microsoft to Google re remedies (1:17:10) - or is it more of a pernicious form of "path dependency"?
- ongoing Amazon case: "the data advantage that Amazon Retail has compared to rivals to compete on Amazon Marketplace is an example perhaps of the issue that given the greater importance of data might be more prevalent in platform markets in the future...Linked to that is artificial intelligence." *Interesting" would be to call AI a buzzword.

Ohlhausen
- "doing better than the other guy is now suspect" (54:19); "companies that looked unassailable at one point have fallen off from that pinnacle" (1.19:25), etc.: The strange case of the US antitrust regime.