2 weeks Ago By David B. Auerbach
And just like that, the European Union’s massive fines on Apple and Meta ensured that competition would reign and the monolithic tech companies that structure our lives would never have such power again. Or perhaps not. Remember when the United States government went after Microsoft for having a Windows and Office monopoly and now they don’t anymore? No? Remember when the EU passed all those laws forcing sites to ask you if they could set cookies, and now no one is tracked on the web? No? How about when the EU passed the AI Act to safeguard against dangerous artificial-intelligence development, so we no longer have to worry about deep fakes or systemic risk? Technology regulation has never been easy, and its history is predominantly one of failure.
For every Bell Telephone breakup, there are countless acts and cases that have been at best useless and at worst, counterproductive. If the Federal Aviation Administration is unable to monitor Boeing’s safety procedures well enough to prevent severe errors even after multiple crashes, what is the likelihood that government oversight can figure out the best way to correct for the monopoly power of huge tech players? Instead, we often get Band-Aids, which are what Wednesday’s fines — 500 million euros over Apple’s store and 200 million euros over Meta’s data collection — are. These companies are so absurdly huge that even proportionate fines will not make a dent in their bottom lines.
If Meta can spend $46 billion on its “bet the company” metaverse strategy and have nothing to show for it, is 200 million euros likely to induce any real change? Over the last 10 years, Google has been fined well over $8 billion in three separate EU cases, some of which are still pending. Last year alone, the EU fined the company $2.4 billion over favoring their comparative shopping services.
But with yearly revenues of $350 billion, those fines are, at worst, a minor drag on Google’s plans. To be sure, all the companies will make minor adjustments to appease regulators and forestall the worst of future fines, but it’s difficult to point to any of these changes as profoundly significant. Like those cookie notifications, which inevitably cause most users to accept all cookies anyway, the changes are frequently facades.
If fines are ineffective, structural remedies like break-ups — as the US Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuits against Google are seeking — are closer to Pandora’s Box. The key questions are two: first, what is the problem to be addressed, and second, how best to address it? For all these cases’ documentation of anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior, and for all the fines and remedies leveled on these companies, neither of these questions has a simple or agreed-upon answer. Monopolies cause problems, for sure, but the societal complaints about these companies relate as much to their influence as to their monopolistic behavior.
A world in which Bing and Google have an equal share of search, or in which Chrome searches no longer default to Google, likely does foster a bit more competition — yet search today is far less important than it was a decade ago. “Fostering innovation” may be a worthy goal, but with the speed of the online world’s evolution, antitrust regulators aren’t any better than Mark Zuckerberg at predicting where competition will truly count . It’s a government’s nature to be backward-looking, always fighting the last battle.
So while the tech giants’ recent slap-downs may feel satisfying to those frustrated with Apple’s inflated prices and Meta’s pushy surveillance, they’re hardly a reckoning for the erosion of privacy and consumer choice that has been going on for decades. Until some set of players, government and corporate, come together in good faith to figure out what a better digital world ought to look like, regulation will remain froth on the ocean. David B.
Auerbach is a software engineer and author of “Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities.”.
