Doctorow: American Tech Cartels Use Apps to Break the Law
7 hours ago
- #Regulatory Capture
- #Regulation
- #Tech Cartels
- Competition is essential for effective regulation as it prevents companies from collectively misleading regulators and reduces their ability to overpower regulations.
- In a highly technological world, individuals rely on expert regulators to navigate complex technical questions that affect daily life, from software safety to food hygiene.
- Regulatory processes involve adversarial truth-seeking exercises where competitors counter each other's claims, ensuring high-quality regulations.
- Concentrated industries (cartels) can easily align on policy priorities and use their accumulated wealth to influence regulators, leading to regulatory capture.
- Tech companies often use apps to circumvent laws, arguing that their actions are legal because they are facilitated by technology (e.g., Uber, Airbnb, fintech).
- Regulatory capture results in underregulation for the dominant industry and overregulation for its competitors, creating an uneven playing field.
- Intellectual property laws further enable tech companies to prevent competitors from fixing exploitative features in their apps.