To help the news business, subject Big Tech to antitrust -- but don't forget Big News's antitrust problem

The University of Chicago Business School's Promarket blog has run a transcript of former antitrust enforcer Sally Hubbard's June 11 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on June 11, 2019, where Hubbard discusses the ways that the monopolized and concentrated tech sector have eroded the margins of the news business, creating a "decline of American journalism."

Hubbard describes how algorithmic upranking or downranking can make or break a media outlet, while ad targeting gives Big Tech the power to command better ad rates than news media can attain; she accepts Big Tech's claim that its machine-learning persuasion technologies can "learn what messages people are susceptible to, whether ads or propaganda" and then create public opinion (I'm skeptical of this claim -- I don't know why we'd take Big Tech's sales literature at face value).

Hubbard then lays into Big Tech's anticompetitive activities, like the buying sprees that have them snapping up hundreds of small companies every year, and the use of "monopoly power to exclude competition."

In response to all this, Hubbard calls for the whole suite of antitrust remedies: forcing selloffs of Big Tech's acquisitions, banning future purchases of small companies that take Big Tech into new lines of business, and an end to "exclusionary practices."

I'm pretty much in favor of all of that, but I was also disappointed by the narrowness of the frame that Hubbard uses to describe news media's woes, and not just because of her belief in Big Tech's ability to turn surveillance data into a mind-control ray. Read the rest