US: Steve Hilton: Rewrite antitrust law to deal with tech monopolies

According to a report from Recode, author Steve Hilton says that to effectively regulate the tech sector, we first have to unlearn a lot of things we take for granted.

“[There’s a] story we used to tell, a true story, about whether Facebook knocked out Myspace and Google knocked out Microsoft, and these tech companies don’t stay powerful for too long,” Hilton said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. “It feels like that’s not really true anymore.”

On top of that, he told Recode’s Kara Swisher, not-very-old axioms about corporate regulation no longer apply. He cited the example of onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who argued that “the size of a company is only a problem” if it prevents customers from getting “decent-quality products and services at a reasonable price.”

Today, multiple tech giants operate in parallel to one another, giving away high-quality products for nothing, which prevents most competitors from challenging their dominance.

“When I was learning economics at university, we had this notion of predatory pricing, which is when you price your product below marginal cost in order to shut out the competition, and that was seen as a problem,” Hilton said. “Well, now, predatory pricing is the business model, which is we give it away free.”

Full Content: Recode