Fines are being treated like a business expense, antitrust and intellectual property law expert Thomas Vinje has said. He’d also argue the culture within big tech needs to be addressed.
Antitrust and intellectual property law expert Thomas Vinje believes enforcement has been largely ineffective when it comes to rebalancing the power many of the larger tech companies purportedly have, as many consider fines to simply be the cost of doing business. Addressing a Global Competition Review webinar on Thursday, Vinje said that in digital markets, once dominance is established, it tends to remain in place. He said that was true of IBM and Microsoft in the past and it is now true of Google, Apple, and Facebook. He rejected the notion put forward by some that the market will just level itself out once precedents are set by some breakthrough companies disrupting the ecosystem. “Digital markets do not move fast once dominance is established,” he said. “It’s often said — I’ve heard many say — we don’t need to act, we don’t need to enforce antitrust laws because these markets move so fast that any problems will be solved by the market. Frankly, that is just not what has happened… it’s not how these things work.” He would argue such markets do not generally correct themselves once dominant positions are established, as they are often protected by very intense network and scale effects. It’s one of the reasons why antitrust enforcement has not acted as the silver bullet, he said. “By the time enforcement is finished, the dominant company has typically achieved the aims, its aims, and reversing the harm is really rarely possible,” he said. “So I’d suggest the conquering moves fast but the resulting system is long lasting … and innovation is lost by virtue of that.” The second reason Vinje suggests as to why antitrust enforcement has been largely ineffective in this realm is that remedies are often not effectively formulated.
