![]() ![]() Our CMA and the USA’s Federal Trade Commission argue that in this future scenario, a dominant supply of content – the games – inhibits competition. This promises to broaden the market beyond hardcore gamers who have a console or a powerful PC. Some small games are already played this way today. At some point in the future, big games will be played over fibre or 6G connections from servers in the cloud. In the first case, the US is suing to halt Microsoft’s $70bn takeover of games publisher Activision, a deal that is also opposed by our own Competition and Markets Authority.Īdjudicating on the deal requires a degree of speculation. (Given Alphabet’s annual revenue is greater than the GDP of around 150 nations, you might think that the Google break up would have drawn more attention.)Īll three cases require tricky decisions – competition regulation is far from an exact science. One is a merger, one an acquisition, and the third an order to break up Google, whose parent Alphabet is the third biggest company in the world. Detail is ugly.Ī trio of competition stories surfaced last week to highlight how messy market regulation really is. What it really reflects is a desire to retreat from a complex world into a much more simplified one where slogans resound but examining the specifics must be avoided at all costs. However, I don’t think it’s the main reason. Instead of making the case for markets and competition, they’ve become dutiful defenders of Big Tech.Ī cynic might say that so many free market think tanks are defending dominant monopolies today because they’re paid to do so. ![]() Where are the free market revolutionaries when you need them? They’re rather thin on the ground. I expect to be paying what I call the Apple Tax – the phrase used to describe the premium paid for using its products and services – until the day I die and it’s not for lack of trying. These bits of code extend so deeply into so many areas of our lives, it isn’t worth the trouble of us switching services. They are also able to hide the algorithms in the process. They’ve succeeded where the Soviet Union’s Gosplan failed. They are able to influence both supply and demand, a sort of “socialism in one company”. Giant technology platforms have discovered they can do something new, which is to internalise the role that an open market would once play. Today we see greater economic concentrations of power than at any time since the Robber Baron Era of the 19th century, and that’s no coincidence. As for markets, nobody seems to care much any more. To get elected, Blair and Brown had to follow suit too.īut history didn’t get the cease and desist order, and it has been very busy since. “The most important thing we had to communicate was that we understood markets, because markets had won,” a senior member of the Clinton administration once told me, reflecting some years later. His essay predicted an infinite future of economic liberalism. History was supposed to have ended in 1990 after the collapse of Communism, according to Francis Fukuyama. ![]()
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