Antitrust in the digital age

I feel like everyone overthinks antitrust. And it got further corrupted by Lina Khan's interesting but ultimately pointless Yale paper.

Much of antitrust case law is rooted in businesses that dealt in "atoms", in a localized world. A simpler framework is better for a digital, global economy.

IMHO: Anti-competitive behavior is when

• a large company

• throws its weight around

• and it results in materially worse outcomes for customers and competitors

• over the short or long term

That's it.

What anti-trust is not:

• When a large company simply exists (without explicitly wielding its influence to crush competition)

• A company becoming massive through sheer quality of products or execution

• When it results in strictly better outcomes for everyone (which is rare)

• When a company is making choices in its interest which simply disregards the needs of others (a company is not intrinsically responsible for doing social good)

• When a company makes a tradeoff that makes one segment (e.g., customers) better off at the expense of another (e.g., competitors)

• When there are "structural concerns" (e.g., market concentration, size) – IMHO these aren’t a problem unless a company actively abuses its position. It's easier than ever to compete against an incumbent, no matter how strong they are. Just look at OpenAI or Anthropic vs. Google DeepMind / Brain.

Not examples of anti-trust:

• Apple only allowing approved apps to be installed on iOS (tradeoff prioritizing consumer security)

• Apple's proprietary connectors (e.g., Lightning)

• Google's dominance in search

• Google building Chrome or Chromebooks

• Amazon buying iRobot (now basically bankrupt) or One Medical

• Meta buying Giphy

• Amazon / Meta / Google / Apple acqui-hiring small teams (which has been completely stifled)

• Amazon bundling Prime Video (the streaming market is *extremely* competitive, which indicates that competitors are certainly not getting pushed out of the market; and consumers certainly benefit)

Examples of anti-trust:

• Apple forcing a 30% cut of Spotify subscriptions and preventing linking out to a web payment page (or any other app which isn't iOS exclusive; consumers are searching for Spotify and happen to download it on iOS, they didn't discover it thanks to the App Store)

• Apple's ATT (App Tracking Transparency) -- consumers aren't "hurt" through better tracking; in fact, it's easy to argue that poorly targeted ads are worse. Importantly, Apple is not subject to any of these restrictions in serving its own ads.

• Google favoring its own reviews over Yelp ratings

• Google controlling both the buy-side and sell-side of the search ads market

• Amazon copying its merchants' products based on intel that should be proprietary to its merchants, and then ranking its own products higher

• Adobe buying Figma

• Visa buying Plaid

• Visa and Mastercard's stranglehold on merchants, effectively colluding to price-fix interchange

• Basically every business practice of Epic Systems

• The Live Nation / Ticketmaster merger (and subsequent cartel-like behavior)

• Predatory pricing by Uber to push Lyft out of the market

• Tech companies "price fixing" salaries and colluding on talent in the Bay Area with "no poach" deals

50/50 calls:

• Facebook buying Instagram or WhatsApp. Hindsight is 20/20; Facebook wasn't as dominant in 2014 so it was waved through; but obviously in retrospect it was dominant *enough*, and those acquisitions were crucial in giving them dominance over social media. But that's also not black & white: look at Tiktok's emergent success.

• Microsoft's acquisition of Activision; while the market still has serious players (Sony, Tencent), it definitely made the gaming market more oligopolistic.

• Monsanto protecting the IP of its genetically engineered seeds.

At the core of it, my argument is rooted in libertarianism... why punish a company for winning through excellence, if it’s not screwing anyone over?