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It's (mostly) great that Big Tech monopolies are *finally* facing regulation.
There are two bad things about monopolies:
I. They cheat their customers and suppliers because they know they're the only game in town, and
II. They use their money to legalize harmful practices.
1/
Here's a Type I example of how Google uses its monopoly power to cheat: Google controls the ad-tech market they rig it in their favor - they represent both buyers and sellers, and they compete with them, and they advantage themselves.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech
But Google's ad-tech stack also has a Type II monopoly abuse: the ad-targeting systems Google sells are extraordinarily, harmfully invasive.
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They get away with this privacy abuse because they convert the money they get from rigging the market to lobby against privacy laws.
There's a real danger that competition authorities seeking to blunt Google's monopoly will get Type I and Type II abuses mixed up. It's great to force Google to run a clean ad marketplace, preferably by forcing it to divest of the units that compete with its own customers.
3/
After all, it's nearly impossible to detect "self-preferencing" in complex markets - like, did Google place its own ad rather than a higher-bidding third-party because it was cheating, or because its algorithm assessed the third-party ad as fraudulent?
And if so, was the algorithm itself designed to overblock third-party ads as potentially fraudulent while applying a more lax standard to the ads that Google sells - and makes more money from?
4/
The entity that runs the market is the referee. Referees shouldn't also be members of one of the teams. Period. Obviously. I mean, come on.
The problem is that breaking up a monopolist is really hard. It can take decades and cost billions.
5/
So regulators, out of ignorance or desperation, continue to allow referees to have a stake in the outcome, and instead seek to improve competition in other domains, especially Type II domains - those bad actions that monopolists get away with because they're too big to stop.
6/
That's what's going on in France right now. The French competition regulator just fined Google $268M for anticompetitive ad-tech abuses. Included in the settlement - which Google says it won't fight - is a mandate for interoperability in ad-tech.
Interop is a *great* remedy for anticompetitive markets, and indeed, it makes tech a prime target for competition enforcement.
7/
When companies are forced to interoperate, their "network effect" advantages can be obliterated, by lowering switching costs.
Interop is a great solution to Type I problems, problems caused by a lack of competition. But it's a *terrible* solution to Type II problems. If a monopolist got away with doing something horrible and abusive, we shouldn't fix that by improving competition.
8/
The last thing we want is competition in practices that harm the public - we don't want companies to see who can commit the most extensive human rights abuses at the lowest costs. That's not something we want to render more efficient.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible
9/
Unfortunately, that's what the French interop remedy for Google does. Rather than abolishing or curbing targeting (substituting noninvasive content-based targeting, reliant on the content of a page rather than the identity of the user), they're helping *everyone* target users.
As Google wrote in its corporate comms about the ruling, it will improve interop by creating a way to share ad-tech data with third party competitors. This is such a fucking monkey's paw.
https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/some-changes-our-ad-technology/
10/
There's going to be more of this. In the UK, the Competition and Market Authority's otherwise excellent report on ad-tech calls for widespread access to "attribution," where ad-tech follows you around forever to see if an ad leads to a sale.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog
There are two kinds of entities agitating for more tech competition and interop. On the one side, you have smaller ad-tech firms and telecoms monopolists who want competition in commercial surveillance.
11/
On the other side, you have public interest groups like EFF, calling for interop as a way to help people escape high-surveillance digital environments by allowing them to take their data with them and maintain their social ties.
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
Interop can be fully privacy-compatible - indeed, interop can be a way to weaken tech to open space to enact and enforce strong privacy rules.
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But there's some forms of competition - competition to invade your privacy - that we should reject altogether, not enhance.
eof/