{"id":178898,"date":"2018-07-23T19:26:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-24T00:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/23\/this-is-intriguing\/"},"modified":"2018-07-23T19:26:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T00:26:00","slug":"this-is-intriguing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/23\/this-is-intriguing\/","title":{"rendered":"This is Intriguing"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Harold Feld, Sr. VP and lawyer at Public Knowledge, has an interesting way to measure excessive market power for anti-trust purposes, that one can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wetmachine.com\/tales-of-the-sausage-factory\/using-the-cost-of-exclusion-to-measure-the-dominance-of-digital-platforms\/\">measure the the cost of exclusion<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">In my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicknowledge.org\/news-blog\/blogs\/platform-regulation-part-ii-defining-digital-platform\">last blog post<\/a>, I explained my working definition for what constitutes a \u201cdigital platform.\u201d Today, I focus on another concept that gets thrown around a lot: \u201cdominant.\u201d While many regulations promoting consumer protection and competition apply throughout a sector, some economic regulations apply to \u201cdominant\u201d firms or firms with \u201cmarket power.\u201d Behavior that is harmless, or potentially even positive when done by smaller companies or in a more competitive marketplace, can be anticompetitive or harmful to consumers when done by dominant firms \u2014 regardless of the firm\u2019s actual intent. <\/p>\n<p>For reasons discussed in my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicknowledge.org\/tag\/Platform+Regulation+Series\">previous blog posts<\/a>, defining what constitutes \u201cdominant\u201d (or even identifying a single market in which to make such a determination), presents many challenges using the traditional tools of analysis favored by antitrust enforcers and regulators. I therefore propose that we use the cost of exclusion (\u201cCOE,\u201d because nothing in policy is taken seriously unless it has its own acronym) as the means of determining when we need to apply regulation to \u201cdominant\u201d firms. That is to say, the greater the cost to individuals and firms (whether as consumers or producers or any of the other roles they may play simultaneously on digital platforms), the greater the need for regulations to protect platform users from harm. If a firm is \u201ctoo big to lose access to,\u201d then we should treat that firm as dominant.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s not the only potential standard for antitrust, but, particularly in the context of large digital platforms, it provides an additional tool to justify regulating large dominant firms.<\/p>\n<p>Now if only antitrust can put the ahistorical and dishonest writings of&nbsp; Robert Bork behind it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harold Feld, Sr. VP and lawyer at Public Knowledge, has an interesting way to measure excessive market power for anti-trust purposes, that one can measure the the cost of exclusion: In my last blog post, I explained my working definition for what constitutes a \u201cdigital platform.\u201d Today, I focus on another concept that gets thrown &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[407,479,504],"class_list":["post-178898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-justice","tag-monopoly","tag-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}