Competition Lore Podcast

Traditional media has been transformed by technological change and across the world, governments and regulators are contemplating the impact of the disruption on the production and consumption of news. 

Central to this consideration is the influence of digital platforms, Google and Facebook particularly, which now in large part shape what news content we consume and when and how we consume it. Crucial to the platforms’ role as news gateways is the advertising that funds their business models, transferring revenue substantially away from news organisations in favour of the search and social media giants.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been conducting an inquiry into the impact of digital platforms on media and advertising markets and has recently released its preliminary report.

In this episode Dr Katharine Kemp from the University of New South Wales steers us through the detailed maze of factual and legal analysis and draws attention to the key findings and principal recommendations as they relate to advertisers and news organisations.

The inquiry website, with links to the Issues Paper, submissions and the preliminary report, can be found here. You can also read Katharine’s initial reaction to the report in a think piece published on The Conversation here.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why is the United States falling behind global competition standards? What drives Margrethe Vestager in leading the European Commission’s aggressive stance on big tech? Why did the Federal Trade Commission walk away from its Google investigation? And why should agencies focus on solutions to market problems, not just big cases and massive fines?

These are just some of the topics canvassed in this episode on competition institutions in a digital age, with Professor William Kovacic of George Washington University and King’s College London.

Bill has an encyclopedic knowledge of competition systems and agencies around the world and a deep understanding of what shapes and determines their effectiveness. He has published extensively on this subject and is in constant demand for his sage counsel on how to evaluate and improve agency performance.

You can find many of his publications on his SSRN page here.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the year draws to a close, this episode takes us on a short stroll down memory lane, re-capping key debates and recurring themes and reliving some of the highlights and the lighter moments from the Competition Lore discussion over its first six months.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Capitalism without competition is not capitalism”.  That is the fundamental and irrefutable premise of a new book by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, named one of the best economics books of 2018 by The Financial Times.

Tepper and Hearn launch a stinging attack on high concentration and insipid competition in the US economy today, documenting and explaining its symptoms and side effects at length. This is a polemic that takes no prisoners. Dysfunctionality and capture of the political, regulatory and academic establishments are recurring themes and, not surprisingly, Big Tech is singled out for special treatment.

The book mounts an extensively researched and engagingly written case for an overhaul of antitrust enforcement to fix the problem.  It's a call to arms, exhorting legislators and courts to ensure that antitrust laws play their part in administering the dose of reinvigorated competition that Tepper and Hearn argue is sorely needed.

Faltering productivity, stymied innovation, stagnant wages growth and rising inequality are not just concerns for the US, however.  They are the preoccupations of economic policymakers and enforcement agencies in many countries around the world, making the book a valuable resource with international relevance.

In this episode, Jonathan shares the key insights from the book and defends its thesis against the arguments that most commonly feature on the opposing side of the debate.

For more details and to order the book, you can visit The Myth of Capitalism website. For more about Jonathan Tepper, he has his own personal website, and you can follow him on Twitter @jtepper2.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The German legislature and competition agency are on the front foot in shoring up antitrust laws and taking action to deal with the challenges raised by a digital economy.

Merger notification rules have been amended to ensure that acquisitions of small but significant competitors by the tech giants do not fall through the net.

The Bundeskartellamt is engaged in a controversial investigation of Facebook’s data collection practices.

And a raft of new regulation for platforms is on the drawing board, as well as potentially far-reaching changes to abuse of dominance laws to deal with intermediation power and market tipping.

In this episode of Competition Lore, Professor Rupprecht Podszun of the Heinrich Heine Universitat Dusseldorf explains these developments, what’s behind them and why they are likely to be influential across Europe. Industrial policy, politics and the philosophical underpinnings of German competition law all feature in the fascinating discussion.

You can access the new statutory provisions in the German competition legislation introduced in 2017 here. The Bundeskartellamt’s preliminary assessment in its Facebook proceeding is available on its website. And the report on Modernising the Law on Abuse of Market Power is also available online.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When grappling with competition issues in the digital economy, Google is often the first name to come up. 

The tech powerhouse has been in the firing line of competition authorities in Europe. Its business model and strategies have sparked intense debate about what big data and big analytics mean for competition and how or even whether antitrust enforcers should respond.

And, yet, for users who share their most intimate details with the search engine, Google has been equated with a "modern-day God".

In this episode of Competition Lore, I am delighted to share the opportunity that I had to discuss these and related issues with Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian.

Hal was not only generous with his time but with his views ranging from general topics such as the role of economics and populism in antitrust to specific issues raised by the European Commission’s decisions against in the Shopping and Android cases.

Aside from setting up the interview, Google had no other input to the production of this episode.

Hal hinted in the episode at a second edition of his co-authored best-selling book; let’s hope we can hold him to that!  But if you want to read the first edition, it is Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.  

The episode features an interjection from Professor Scott Galloway with his thesis that Google is a “modern day God”. You may find his book, The Four, of interest or you could listen to his TED Talk.

Or, if you’re one of those who likes to contemplate whether there is “life after Google”, then you should read the book by George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and Rise of the Blockchain Economy, also referred to in the episode. Or you could just watch this on Youtube.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Academics are making an important contribution to current debates regarding the policies and laws that govern competition in the digital era.  Independence and objectivity in academic research are crucial to the value and impact of that contribution.

In this second episode in our mini-series on Academics and Big Tech, you’ll hear from Professor Ioannis Lianos of University College London on why he considers there to be serious risks to the integrity of academic research as a result of undisclosed funding by large tech companies. 

The episode is a sequel to episode 13 in which Professor Daniel Sokol gave us a quite different perspective on these issues. However, this episode goes further, to explore why and how the playing field for research funding could and should be made more level and the importance of fairness in funding to allow for research that pushes the boundaries and tests the status quo.

You will find the Academic Society for Competition Law’s Declaration of Ethics referred to in the episode here and you can read about Ioannis’s efforts to promote greater disclosure of corporate funding for academic research here.

If you would like to read Ioannis’s latest thinking on how mainstream doctrines in competition law should be challenged, I highly recommend this paper:

The Poverty of Competition Law, 2018.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Technological transformations are raising a host of legal and economic issues that are keeping competition law academics very busy!

But are there risks to academic independence in the era of big tech? And are they any different to the experience with big oil, big tobacco, big pharma?

Recently there has been publicity surrounding the extent to which large tech companies are funding academic research that supports their policy and legal objectives.  Some are concerned that this threatens the integrity and value of the academic enterprise, particularly when there is non-disclosure of funding or potential conflicts of interest. Others are more accommodating, conscious of the impact of cut backs in government funding for research and keen to see greater engagement between universities and private enterprise.

In this episode of Competition Lore, we hear from one of the antitrust scholars in the thick of the debate.  Professor Daniel Sokol is from the University of Florida Levin College of Law and is also an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a client of which is Google. Danny shares his thoughts on being implicated personally in the campaign against so-called “Google Academics” and we talk about what it means to be a modern day scholar with a range of roles inside and outside of academia.

Here is a sample of Danny’s recent work in relation to antitrust issues and big tech:

The Cambridge Handbook of Antitrust, Intellectual Property, and High Tech, 2017

Understanding Online Markets and Antitrust Analysis, 2017 (with Jingyuan Mua)

Responding to Antitrust and Information Technology, 2017

Does Antitrust Have a Role to Play in Regulating Big Data?, 2016 (with Roisin Comerford)

The Broader Implications of Merger Remedies in High Technology Markets, 2014

The Google Transparency Project report referred in the episode can be found here.

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“I think it’s hard to have a mission of wanting to bring the whole world closer together and leave out the biggest country..”. That was Mark Zuckerberg’s response when asked recently about Facebook’s record of attempted entry into China.

By and large GAFA have struggled to compete in the largest economy in the world.  Meanwhile BAT (the homegrown tech trio, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) represent the new Chinese dragons, dominating in search, e-commerce, messaging, AI and other digital market spaces.

In this episode of Competition Lore Dr Wendy Ng, a specialist in the political economy of Chinese competition law at the University of Melbourne, shares her insights on the context that shapes the way in which the Anti-Monopoly Law works in China.

We canvas how the political and socio-cultural dynamics influence the law’s enforcement and the approach taken to abuse of dominance in particular. She explains the co-dependent relationship between the powerful domestic tech companies and the government and what challenges face their US counterparts.  Issues of digital protectionism come up!

For anyone practising in this field in China or wanting to understand the context in which Chinese competition law operates, I highly recommend Wendy’s book:

The Political Economy of Competition Law in China, 2018.

And here is a sample of some of her other recent papers on related topics:

The Influence of Socialist Principles on the Legal Regulation of Markets in China: The Anti-Monopoly Law, 2018

The Independence of Chinese Competition Agencies and the Impact on Competition Enforcement in China, 2015

Policy Objectives of Public Enforcement of the Anti-Monopoly Law: An Assessment of the First Five Years, 2015

You can follow Wendy on Twitter at @wendyengee.  

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On 18 July this year Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s competition czar, announced a record €4.3 billion fine against Google in relation to various practices concerning Android, the search giant’s popular mobile operating system.

It comes just over a year after the European Commission’s €2.4 billion fine in the so-called Google Shopping case, discussed with Professor Pinar Akman on episode 7 of Competition Lore.

The Android case relates to complex contractual agreements that Google requires phonemakers to sign if they want to access the company’s popular digital services, in particular the ‘must have’ Google Play Store.

The decision sparked a barrage of commentary, for and against, not least in the latter camp from the Google CEO who argues that the Android story is one of “more competition not less” in the mobile eco-system and to the benefit of now more than 2 billion Android phone users.

In this episode of Competition Lore you’ll hear from Professor Nicolas Petit and Professor Simonetta Vezzoso, two of the many commentators who are dissecting the decision and who have very different views on whether the European Commission got it right. You'll also hear from Margrethe Vestager, the European Competition Commissioner, and from Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO!

Full reasons for the decision are yet to be released. In the meantime, you can read the press release here and watch the announcement by Margrethe Vestager at the press conference here.

You can follow developments in Nicolas’s and Simonetta’s thinking about the case and other aspects of competition and big tech on Twitter or their blogs and you might also be interested in some of their longer form writing:

Nicolas

@CompetitionProf

https://symphonyofdisruption.org/

EU engaged in antitrust gerrymandering against Google, 2018

'Big is bad' narrative is simply untrue in high-tech sector, 2018 (with Richard Sousa)

The Misguided Assault on the Consumer Welfare Standard in the Age of Platform Markets, 2018

Technology Giants, the Moligopoly Hypothezis and Holistic Competition: A Primer, 2016

Simonetta

@wavesblog

https://competitionwave.blogspot.com/

Android and Forking Restrictions: On the Hidden Closedness of “Open”, 2018

Fintech, Access to Data, and the Role of Competition Policy, 2018

Competition by design, 2017

Online Platforms, Rate Parity, and the Free Riding Defence, 2016

Featuring regular cut-through interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers, Competition Lore is a podcast series that engages us all in a debate about the transformative potential and risks of digitalised competition.

Join Caron Beaton-Wells, Professor in Competition Law at the University of Melbourne, to tackle what it means to participate as a competitor, consumer or citizen in a digital economy and society.

Competition Lore is produced by Written & Recorded

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.