Senate Judiciary Antitrust Hearing on Big Data Based on Flawed Premises

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WASHINGTON – The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust will hold a hearing today on the implications of data on competition. Subcommittee Chair Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) told POLITICO, “Big data is at the core of our modern economy, powering targeted advertising, driving artificial intelligence. It’s a really intense competition issue at its core.”

Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ryan Young said:

“Sen. Klobuchar and her colleagues are arguing that the sheer scale of Big Data makes it difficult for smaller companies to compete in areas such as targeted advertising and algorithm development. There are several problems with this argument.

“One is that new companies are still entering the market and succeeding. TikTok is now garnering more viewing time than Google’s YouTube, and was the most-downloaded app of 2020, surpassing established giants such as Facebook. Zoom, which nobody had heard of two years ago, almost instantly overtook established competitors from Microsoft and other tech giants, and its brand has even become a verb.

“Two, simply having data and established networks of users did not stop Amazon from failing with its Fire phone, Google failing with its social Network Google+, or the anemic performance of Facebook’s Portal devices.

“Three, if the ad market was anti-competitive, the big companies would be able to get away with raising their prices. Instead, ad prices fell by half over the period 2009-2019, even as print ad prices doubled in some cases. Google, Facebook, Apple, and other incumbents spend billions of dollars on research and development. Companies that feel safe from competition do not do this.

“Sens. Klobuchar, Hawley, and others want to write new, expanded antitrust laws. All this would accomplish is give incumbent companies another set of regulations they can game in their own favor; regulatory capture is real. A greater threat of being sued would also have a chilling effect on innovations that regulators might not understand or approve of. The economy needs room to recover, not more central direction from Washington.”

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