The European Union launched an Antitrust Complaint against Google over Android. It is a shame that we keep coming back to using antitrust legislation to try to deal with issues of concentration and market power in information industries. We need alternative regulatory tools that are more in line with how computation works and why the properties of information tend to lead to concentration.
We want networks and network effects to exist because of their positive externalities. Imagine as a counter factual a world of highly fragmented operating systems for smartphones – it would make it extremely difficult for app developers to write apps that work well for everyone (hard enough across iOS and Android).
At the same time we want to prevent networks and network effect companies from becoming so powerful and extractive that they stifle innovation. For instance, I have written before about how the app store duopoly has prevented certain kinds of innovation.
Antitrust is a sledge hammer that was invented at a time of large industrial companies that had no network effects. Using it now is a bad idea and doubly so because it goes only after Google which has by far the more open mobile operating system when compared to Apple.
So what could we do instead? We have to shift the power in computation towards the edge and prevent enclosures of computation. The Web did this very effectively with an open standard and ad blocking on the web is an example of the power this has given to the edge.
We need something similar for mobile. In the absence of a standard that is embraced (it could still emerge and could even be the web itself!) one push would be what I call the right to be represented by a bot (see the second half of my TEDxNY talk) and could also be thought of as the right to an API key.
Interestingly that approach doesn’t just mitigate the negative effects of networks on innovation but also gets fundamentally at the co-ownership of data between users and providers of services.
