Big Tech is facing the prospect of broad sectoral regulation that goes well beyond the narrow antitrust focus that has defined government interest in the industry in recent decades, according to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and top lawyer. However, a break-up of today’s dominant online platforms seems unlikely, he suggested.
Speaking in an interview this week, Mr Smith, who joined Microsoft in 1993, predicted a return to a period when government set broad rules governing how particular industry sectors operate, rather than focusing on individual cases of economic harm caused by monopolists.
The shift reflects the wide range of concerns stirred up by today’s leading consumer tech companies, including privacy and the mass collection of data. Also, the fact that a number of different companies are involved, rather than a single dominant monopolist, makes broader action likely, he suggested. “It won’t surprise me if we see more focus in Brussels, and perhaps even in Washington, on that set of issues and not one thing alone,” Mr Smith said.
Changes in the way regulators think about competition are also reshaping the response to tech’s market power, he added, with “new schools of antitrust thinking” taking hold. That is leading to broader theories of potential harm, not just those to do with limiting competition or pushing up prices for consumers.
“You can’t help but note that the year 2019 is significant in that Berlin and Washington have both embraced a similar approach to some degree, arguing that it is appropriate to consider more of these so-called non-economic, non-price issues — and that’s unusual,” he said.
The widening interest of the regulators was on display in Washington on Tuesday, when top US competition regulators answered questions before the Senate judiciary committee. Makan Delrahim, head of the Department of Justice antitrust division, said allegations of political bias against companies like Google and Facebook were likely to be taken into account in any assessment of the companies’ market power.
