The Proposed U.S. Access Act Mandating Interoperability Will Not Unleash Competition in Social Networking: Here’s How to Fix it

Congress is considering legislation (“the ACCESS Act”) that mandates interoperability in an effort to stimulate competition in digital markets such as social networking. However, as currently written, the legislation is likely to fail in its objective. The reason is that it ignores one of the crucial forces that has allowed firms such as Meta to remain at the top of the social networking space: the indirect network effects from their rich streams of user-generated data that allow them to cur