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First of all, it's easier to be able to optimize for this; this is many more steps removed from the company, so you do the chain of causation is less certain. That makes all of the harms less speculative. It's also more dependent on exogenous outcomes that they can't control, so it's much harder to optimize. |
And it's a values distinction, right? We don't—it's trivially good that cheaper prices and better quality are better for everyone, but this is about a series of value trade-offs, which makes it incredibly difficult to optimize for. |
But even if we could optimize both equally, we would say that this is a more important standard because economic conditions are the most important thing to most people around the world living close to the poverty line. This matters to everyone, not just people who particularly care about privacy. |
It matters to consumers; it matters to firms and their growth and their workers when they can get cheaper input goods. We can probably predict it much better on our side. We have things like market modeling; we have lots of super analogous examples. |
We also get far better—oh, also know, we can, on our side, regulate out the set of things that they want to talk about. We can set a baseline; we can say you can't do these bad forms of price dumping. But you can't set a baseline for competition law because you're worried about price freezing out supply. |
You can't set a baseline for how much innovation you have to do. And the next thing to say is that consumer law actually feeds into other things because the consumer standard feeds into other things. Because when goods are cheaper, consumers can more optimize for themselves what kind of privacy they want because they c... |
Because economic development allows you to develop things that end up, in the future, contributing to those externalities. We also get less corruption on our side because they talk about democracy. I don't think it's a good idea that the government is able to make decisions about who can and cannot stay. |
I think that the government shouldn't be making that decision. I think that in the worst cases, where democracy is actually under threat, that is incredibly likely to get weaponized in order to throw down your political enemies; that is a huge harm. |
</lo> |
<dpm> |
Two questions in this speech. First, which side has—on which side is regulation more likely to be successful? And second, the side that provides the most impactful regulation on success OO makes a number of trades. |
The first thing they say is that this makes mergers and acquisitions more difficult because it relies on a more nebulous legal standard and more nebulous legal reasoning. First, I want to point out that this does not interact with the material you get from Victor that explains why M&As are likely to be harmful in the f... |
What's different is that it is difficult for you to prove that the margin by which you reduce or increase prices is a margin that is likely to be consequential. Is a $1 increase enough? Is a $2 increase enough that sort of thing? They then say that a reduction in M&As is harmful in two ways. First, because on their sid... |
They then say that these companies become less vulnerable to shocks. I only think this is true for horizontal mergers, that is, cross-industry mergers. But I think in the majority of cases of this debate this likely deals with vertical mergers because this is where harm to antitrust is almost consequential. If you own ... |
This is important because this debate likely happens in Western countries that rely on a posterior legal system where it's impossible to preemptively litigate, or rather very difficult to preemptively litigate because courts are very focused on proving a degree of harm to consumers that they will never be able to prove... |
We think we do that best before The second question on impact for regulation; Cases |
<poi> |
Just to clarify: do you agree that there will be a substantial increase in blocking of mergers and acquisitions on your side? |
</poi> |
We think there will be a reasonable number of mergers and acquisitions on both sides. We think this debate should be premised on the fact that a finite number of mergers have been flagged. This is simply a question of, on both sides, we're litigating for the same mid-day, which is more likely to yield impactful regulat... |
Opposition says that economics are often the most important thing to consumers, but I want to be perfectly clear on a number of levels here. First, often consumers within the market are able to regulate for things that affect their economic conditions most directly. Consumers can see for themselves when prices have gon... |
This is precisely why we think the FTC and the DOJ need to be the ones to creatively point out these harms and try to prevent them. But secondly, I think there's a logical priority here because obviously economic conditions, the media, and consumers are reliant on things like the existence of a functional democracy. In... |
I want to weigh this in two ways. One, the places where this debate likely exists are places where harms to non-economic outcomes are under new scrutiny in a number of ways. In cases like the US and the EU, where right populists have gained power, where climate justice movements are on the rise, and where privacy issue... |
Before AT&T and T-Mobile attempted to engage the merger in 2011, they flooded the market with advertisements about how much the cost of accessing, for example, the internet would go down and how incredible this would be for the immediate consumer. Often, we think it is necessary for you to be able to connect pre-existi... |
Harm to democracy is often dangerous to the middle class because you take away the political capital that they often use as a check against the economic capital of the ruling class. This means most importantly that we think these kinds of harms should be prioritized because they are the most approximate to the median c... |
</dpm> |
<dlo> |
I talk generally about the biggest question. This, and I'll get into the specific claims made by the opposition. The most obvious question you need to ask in this is is trading of business growth, all these goals, environmental, privacy, and democratic protections actually work. This is central to whether you should em... |
That should suggest to you that at best, I think this happens to a very small extent. Even if closing government let go off that significantly. Secondly there's also no proof of why causing these harms necessarily comes from a lack of competition. This is to say that a tech firm buying a data company can significantly ... |
For the rest of this, I would now pretend as if they had proved both of those things to be true. And later, why is it not worth trading up business growth for these goals? Firstly, as we explained, these harms, not universally, are great harms in the first place. All people believe that harms to the environment are act... |
Secondly, even when they are agreed to be harmful, the trade-off is much more ambiguous than with consumer issues. Environmentalism, for example, is often a controversial issue. It's something that affects a small group of people, the people who live in that area that is being polluted at the benefit of everyone else w... |
And thirdly, business growth is just very, very important. It gives people access to jobs and prevents businesses from going under. Often, the reason why acquisition or mergers occur is because those two businesses couldn't independently operate without this. It creates more efficiency, which again leads to more jobs. ... |
The final thing that I want to prove here is that I am on the side of being overly valuing these kinds of protections, like protections of the environment and democracy over business concerns. Why is that true? Firstly, it's because they're appointed by politicians. Some politicians care a lot about business concerns, ... |
Secondly, those judges are often unaccountable. They kind of cannot be removed because of the separation between the legislature and the courts, which means that when they make bad decisions or have a proven track record overly leaning towards environmentalism, it can be very difficult to review. That level of judicial... |
The environment, like I should believe, is this trade-off worth it in theory or in practice? But secondly, and arguably more importantly than that, this is clearly something better handled by governments and by democracy. If the trade-off is ambiguous and it's unclear whether it's worth it, you put it in the hands of p... |
Let me just respond specifically to the claims made by this team. Their first claim is that this will lead to more data being released on the level of environmental concerns. They actively release that data. Firstly, there's no reason to believe they would freely release that data; they might store that data so they ca... |
Thirdly, collecting that data is a big expense. It slows down business because you have to do a lot more record-keeping and keeping track of that data, which means you do actually face a trade-off here, which in many cases isn't worth it. You don't need to do that because the merger or acquisition was fine in the first... |
Next, this will lead to more political will to be controlled and pledged. This isn't the easiest flip in the world. Firstly, because these are much more ambiguous. Now, DPM explicitly says that issues like harms to the environment or harms to privacy or harms to democracy occur over very long periods of time and are th... |
This means they see regulators blocking things that would create jobs, maintain business stability, and support growth at the expense of something they have not realized yet. Comparatively, other things are much more politically valuable, which is why those sensible levels of regulation get more support on our side. |
But secondly, it's more politically unvaluable specifically to the right. These are obviously things that hug towards left issues, like privacy, democracy, and environmentalism. These are left issues, whereas specifically right-wing parties oppose them. The impact of this is probably that it's less popular in general t... |
<poi> |
Your case seems internally inconsistent. So that's majority of people care primarily about economics and politicians probably appoint people who don't go crazy far left woke and only |
care about environmental issues by your own characterization... |
</poi> |
Well the problem with that is there are different people in the world right some people prefer issues. others don't. we have left wing parties, right wing parties. our intention is left wing parties are in power, which obviously happens a lot around the world. they appoint police judges that cause a series of harms and... |
The final thing I want to point out is the large amount of corruption that will likely occur as a result of this. This occurs at the individual level, where the regulators are captured by the government because it becomes substantially more in their interest to do political goals as well as those smaller financial goal... |
</dlo> |
<mo> |
The main problem with the top half is the problem of characterizing the types of cases where the consumer welfare standard differs from the citizen welfare standard. The answer from closing government is relatively straightforward. The clearest example where this debate meaningfully differs is the example of large tech... |
The other reason the consumer welfare standard does not work in the context of large tech corporations is because the perception, especially amongst the non-tech world, is that large tech companies are enormously innovative and job-creating. Most people think of Google, Microsoft, or Amazon as highly innovative, which ... |
I want to be very clear about why this framing is important. Opening opposition runs a very scary doomsday case about what happens when judges start blocking mergers left, right, and center. But no, that's not what's going to happen under this debate. Why? Because on both sides of the house, you will only block mergers... |
Whereas the much more important part of the debate is the context of tech companies, which is why, for example, Lina Khan—it's not Lisa Khan, by the way—is so in favor of our policy because she wants increased capacity to go after large tech companies. |
The other reason this is important is it answers opening opposition's challenge: "Oh, a fair claim. Why can't we just regulate these companies? Why do we need antitrust?" This is the burden closing opposition will fill that puts us over opening government. You cannot regulate big tech companies for three reasons. Reaso... |
Secondly, the pace of advancement in AI is far faster than the pace of advancement in legislators. No government can keep up with this. This is a one-liner PM, but here's the real reason why the legislative process is slow: it involves horse trading. You have lots of discussions between lots of different parties. By co... |
Reason number three: governments do not regulate tech because of fears of regulatory arbitrage. The reason the United States will never strictly regulate AI is fear that if you tightly regulate AI, AI companies will flow elsewhere, for example, into less regulated districts. This answers the problem that opening govern... |
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