Gus Hurwitz called the bill dead in September. Then it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee. Now, there are some reports that suggest it could be added to the obviously unrelated National Defense Authorization Act (it should be noted that the JCPA was not included in the version of NDAA introduced in the U.S. House).
For an overview of the bill and its flaws, see Dirk Auer and Ben Sperry’s tl;dr. The JCPA would force “covered” online platforms like Facebook and Google to pay for journalism accessed through those platforms. When a user posts a news article on Facebook, which then drives traffic to the news source, Facebook would have to pay. I won’t get paid for links to my banger cat videos, no matter how popular they are, since I’m not a qualifying publication.
I’m going to focus on one aspect of the bill: the use of “final offer arbitration” (FOA) to settle disputes between platforms and news outlets. FOA is sometimes called “baseball arbitration” because it is used for contract disputes in Major League Baseball. This form of arbitration has also been implemented in other jurisdictions to govern similar disputes, notably by the Australian ACCC.
Before getting to the more complicated case, let’s start simple.
Scenario #1: I’m a corn farmer. You’re a granary who buys corn. We’re both invested in this industry, so let’s assume we can’t abandon negotiations in the near term and need to find an agreeable price. In a market, people make offers. Prices vary each year. I decide when to sell my corn based on prevailing market prices and my beliefs about when they will change.
Scenario #2: A government agency comes in (without either of us asking for it) and says the price of corn this year is $6 per bushel. In conventional economics, we call that a price regulation. Unlike a market price, where both sides sign off, regulated prices do not enjoy mutual agreement by the parties to the transaction.
Scenario #3: Instead of a price imposed independently by regulation, one of the parties (say, the corn farmer) may seek a higher price of $6.50 per bushel and petition the government. The government agrees and the price is set at $6.50. We would still call that price regulation, but the outcome reflects what at least one of the parties wanted and some may argue that it helps “the little guy.” (Let’s forget that many modern farms are large operations with bargaining power. In our head and in this story, the corn farmer is still a struggling mom-and-pop about to lose their house.)
Scenario #4: Instead of listening only to the corn farmer, both the farmer and the granary tell the government their “final offer” and the government picks one of those offers, not somewhere in between. The parties don’t give any reasons—just the offer. This is called “final offer arbitration” (FOA).
As an arbitration mechanism, FOA makes sense, even if it is not always ideal. It avoids some of the issues that can attend “splitting the difference” between the parties.
While it is better than other systems, it is still a price regulation. In the JCPA’s case, it would not be imposed immediately; the two parties can negotiate on their own (in the shadow of the imposed FOA). And the actual arbitration decision wouldn’t technically be made by the government, but by a third party. Fine. But ultimately, after stripping away the veneer, this is all just an elaborate mechanism built atop the threat of the government choosing the price in the market.
I call that price regulation. The losing party does not like the agreement and never agreed to the overall mechanism. Unlike in voluntary markets, at least one of the parties does not agree with the final price. Moreover, neither party explicitly chose the arbitration mechanism.
The JCPA’s FOA system is not precisely like the baseball situation. In baseball, there is choice on the front-end. Players and owners agree to the system. In baseball, there is also choice after negotiations start. Players can still strike; owners can enact a lockout. Under the JCPA, the platforms must carry the content. They cannot walk away.
I’m an economist, not a philosopher. The problem with force is not that it is unpleasant. Instead, the issue is that force distorts the knowledge conveyed through market transactions. That distortion prevents resources from moving to their highest valued use.
How do we know the apple is more valuable to Armen than it is to Ben? In a market, “we” don’t need to know. No benevolent outsider needs to pick the “right” price for other people. In most free markets, a seller posts a price. Buyers just need to decide whether they value it more than that price. Armen voluntarily pays Ben for the apple and Ben accepts the transaction. That’s how we know the apple is in the right hands.
Often, transactions are about more than just price. Sometimes there may be haggling and bargaining, especially on bigger purchases. Workers negotiate wages, even when the ad stipulates a specific wage. Home buyers make offers and negotiate.
But this just kicks up the issue of information to one more level. Negotiating is costly. That is why sometimes, in anticipation of costly disputes down the road, the two sides voluntarily agree to use an arbitration mechanism. MLB players agree to baseball arbitration. That is the two sides revealing that they believe the costs of disputes outweigh the losses from arbitration.
Again, each side conveys their beliefs and values by agreeing to the arbitration mechanism. Each step in the negotiation process allows the parties to convey the relevant information. No outsider needs to know “the right” answer.For a choice to convey information about relative values, it needs to be freely chosen.
At an abstract level, any trade has two parts. First, people agree to the mechanism, which determines who makes what kinds of offers. At the grocery store, the mechanism is “seller picks the price and buyer picks the quantity.” For buying and selling a house, the mechanism is “seller posts price, buyer can offer above or below and request other conditions.” After both parties agree to the terms, the mechanism plays out and both sides make or accept offers within the mechanism.
We need choice on both aspects for the price to capture each side’s private information.
For example, suppose someone comes up to you with a gun and says “give me your wallet or your watch. Your choice.” When you “choose” your watch, we don’t actually call that a choice, since you didn’t pick the mechanism. We have no way of knowing whether the watch means more to you or to the guy with the gun.
When the JCPA forces Facebook to negotiate with a local news website and Facebook offers to pay a penny per visit, it conveys no information about the relative value that the news website is generating for Facebook. Facebook may just be worried that the website will ask for two pennies and the arbitrator will pick the higher price. It is equally plausible that in a world without transaction costs, the news would pay Facebook, since Facebook sends traffic to them. Is there any chance the arbitrator will pick Facebook’s offer if it asks to be paid? Of course not, so Facebook will never make that offer.
For sure, things are imposed on us all the time. That is the nature of regulation. Energy prices are regulated. I’m not against regulation. But we should defend that use of force on its own terms and be honest that the system is one of price regulation. We gain nothing by a verbal sleight of hand that turns losing your watch into a “choice” and the JCPA’s FOA into a “negotiation” between platforms and news.
In economics, we often ask about market failures. In this case, is there a sufficient market failure in the market for links to justify regulation? Is that failure resolved by this imposition?
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
26 July, 10 A.F. (after fairness)
Dear Fellow Inquisitors,
It has been more than a decade now since the Federal Neutrality Commission, born of the ashes of the old world, ushered in the Age of Fairness.
As you all know, the FNC was created during the Online Era, when the emergence of the largest companies in human history opened our eyes to the original sin of the competitive process: unfairness.
In the course of their evolution, digital platforms—the vanity fairs of the XXI century—had created entire ecosystems that offered integrated services that were so comfortable to use together that they led to a double-sin: sloth on the part of the consumers, and the unfair exclusion of competitors, who were barred from exercising their God-given right to participate in every market and every platform—and to prosper.
Digital stores selling their own branded goods, social-media apps with their own messaging services, search engines using search statistics to generate optimally efficient tools that surpassed the (legitimate) confines of their core functions and spilled over into the dominion of job search, flight booking, or housing apps … App stores were even using their own recognizable software to guarantee that the apps they distributed met the highest standards of security and trustworthiness!
While these things might not seem entirely unreasonable (especially to the heathens: selfish and individualistic consumers who care about nothing other than satisfying their base hedonistic desires), they in fact led to unspeakable evils that flouted the common good.
For example, they made it very, very uncomfortable for someone who wanted to start their own real-estate business to compete with such strong rival companies, who could leverage their superior efficiency in their core markets to become nigh-unbeatable in offering the cheapest, most relevant housing ads. To make matters worse, the gargantuan spending of the digital platforms on research and development built additional moats of quality and innovation around their products—both core and adjacent—that made them utterly unimpregnable to rivals specializing in just one area.
By constantly leveraging their core services to offer better and improved products on adjacent markets, digital platforms had made it unfairly difficult for other companies to join the race and deliver us to “perfect competition”—the euphoric state of blissful equilibrium foretold by the high priests of the only true belief system, Economics.
But not all was lost, and we hadn’t been forsaken. In those dark and faithless days, it was revealed to us by Sen. Amy Klobuchar—praise be her name—that the loathsome practice whereby online companies favored their own products and services over their rivals had a name, “self-preferencing,” and that it was a sin. And, most importantly, that it could be eradicated.
Fortunately, and thanks to the vigilance of the FNC, legal steps were swiftly taken to make the praxis of the Digital Economy more closely resemble its theory, as passed on to us by our forefathers.
And it worked, brothers and sisters! The prohibition of self-preferencing in digital markets made online products much more homogenous, thus validating one of the main assumptions of Economics. In addition, new competition-law Acts, with mechanisms such as forced data sharing, have eliminated all the messy experimentation that had hitherto led to varied (and risky) business models and diversified approaches. By turning competition into forced collaboration, we had finally made it stable, equal, and predictable; in one word: fair.
And what of the sinner in every one of us? Before the great revelation, blasphemous “consumers”—an anachronistic and reductive term for “socially responsible citizens”—were committing the sin of laziness:sloth. Now, choice is finally mandated, and nothing can be pre-selected or even integrated. No more arbitrary safe-browsing mechanisms, integrated malware detectors and spam filters. Where digital platforms experimented and imposed results on us, we are now coercively free to experiment by ourselves—and on ourselves! Online searches today lead to thousands of indistinguishable links hiding an infinity of surprises, requiring us to be more circumspect and informed than ever before. In one word: the prohibition of self-preferencing has improved the moral character of the human stock.
It is universally known that we owe the dawn of the Age of Fairness to the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, adopted by Congress in the year 2022; and the unwavering vigilance of the FNC. What is lesser known—and what I am here to instill in you today—is that that was just the beginning. The success of AICOA has opened our eyes to an even more ancient and perverse evil: self-preferencing in offline markets. It revealed to us that—for centuries, if not millennia—companies in various industries—from togas to wine, from cosmetics to insurance—had, in fact, always preferred their own initiatives over those of their rivals!
Just as the ancient chariot constructors designed chariots to suit the build of their own thoroughbred horses (thereby foreclosing horses raised by other breeders), the XX century car producers were using spare parts delivered by a supplier organizationally related to their company.
This realization has accelerated the birth pangs of the American Innovation and Choice Offline Act, which we are here to announce today. With it, the FNC will eliminate all remnants of unfair rivalry—online and offline—so that we, as one community of faith, can finally enjoy the true benefits of competition. But we must never forget that this tenuous equilibrium hangs by a thread, and that we owe it all to the indefatigable efforts of the FNC agents patrolling the streets, supermarkets, restaurants, gyms, factories, and just about everything else every single day.
Of course, there is still a lot to be done. But every long journey must begin somewhere.
Today, I want to warn you against sin and urge you to adopt the religion of fairness[1] before the day of judgment comes.
Amen.
[1] Or any other religion that condemns self-preferencing. I want to recommend them all equally.
The wave of populist antitrust that has been embraced by regulators and legislators in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and other jurisdictions rests on the assumption that currently dominant platforms occupy entrenched positions that only government intervention can dislodge. Following this view, Facebook will forever dominate social networking, Amazon will forever dominate cloud computing, Uber and Lyft will forever dominate ridesharing, and Amazon and Netflix will forever dominate streaming. This assumption of platform invincibility is so well-established that some policymakers advocate significant interventions without making any meaningful inquiry into whether a seemingly dominant platform actually exercises market power.
Yet this assumption is not supported by historical patterns in platform markets. It is true that network effects drive platform markets toward “winner-take-most” outcomes. But the winner is often toppled quickly and without much warning. There is no shortage of examples.
In 2007, a columnist in The Guardian observed that “it may already be too late for competitors to dislodge MySpace” and quoted an economist as authority for the proposition that “MySpace is well on the way to becoming … a natural monopoly.” About one year later, Facebook had overtaken MySpace “monopoly” in the social-networking market. Similarly, it was once thought that Blackberry would forever dominate the mobile-communications device market, eBay would always dominate the online e-commerce market, and AOL would always dominate the internet-service-portal market (a market that no longer even exists). The list of digital dinosaurs could go on.
All those tech leaders were challenged by entrants and descended into irrelevance (or reduced relevance, in eBay’s case). This occurred through the force of competition, not government intervention.
Why This Time is Probably Not Different
Given this long line of market precedents, current legislative and regulatory efforts to “restore” competition through extensive intervention in digital-platform markets require that we assume that “this time is different.” Just as that slogan has been repeatedly rebutted in the financial markets, so too is it likely to be rebutted in platform markets.
There is already supporting evidence.
In the cloud market, Amazon’s AWS now faces vigorous competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. In the streaming market, Amazon and Netflix face stiff competition from Disney+ and Apple TV+, just to name a few well-resourced rivals. In the social-networking market, Facebook now competes head-to-head with TikTok and seems to be losing. The market power once commonly attributed to leading food-delivery platforms such as Grubhub, UberEats, and DoorDash is implausible after persistent losses in most cases, and the continuous entry of new services into a rich variety of local and product-market niches.
Those who have advocated antitrust intervention on a fast-track schedule may remain unconvinced by these inconvenient facts. But the market is not.
Investors have already recognized Netflix’s vulnerability to competition, as reflected by a 35% fall in its stock price on April 20 and a decline of more than 60% over the past 12 months. Meta, Facebook’s parent, also experienced a reappraisal, falling more than 26% on Feb. 3 and more than 35% in the past 12 months. Uber, the pioneer of the ridesharing market, has declined by almost 50% over the past 12 months, while Lyft, its principal rival, has lost more than 60% of its value. These price freefalls suggest that antitrust populists may be pursuing solutions to a problem that market forces are already starting to address.
The Forgotten Curse of the Incumbent
For some commentators, the sharp downturn in the fortunes of the so-called “Big Tech” firms would not come as a surprise.
It has long been observed by some scholars and courts that a dominant firm “carries the seeds of its own destruction”—a phrase used by then-professor and later-Judge Richard Posner, writing in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1971. The reason: a dominant firm is liable to exhibit high prices, mediocre quality, or lackluster innovation, which then invites entry by more adept challengers. However, this view has been dismissed as outdated in digital-platform markets, where incumbents are purportedly protected by network effects and switching costs that make it difficult for entrants to attract users. Depending on the set of assumptions selected by an economic modeler, each contingency is equally plausible in theory.
The plunging values of leading platforms supplies real-world evidence that favors the self-correction hypothesis. It is often overlooked that network effects can work in both directions, resulting in a precipitous fall from market leader to laggard. Once users start abandoning a dominant platform for a new competitor, network effects operating in reverse can cause a “run for the exits” that leaves the leader with little time to recover. Just ask Nokia, the world’s leading (and seemingly unbeatable) smartphone brand until the Apple iPhone came along.
Market self-correction inherently outperforms regulatory correction: it operates far more rapidly and relies on consumer preferences to reallocate market leadership—a result perfectly consistent with antitrust’s mission to preserve “competition on the merits.” In contrast, policymakers can misdiagnose the competitive effects of business practices; are susceptible to the influence of private interests (especially those that are unable to compete on the merits); and often mispredict the market’s future trajectory. For Exhibit A, see the protracted antitrust litigation by the U.S. Department against IBM, which started in 1975 and ended in withdrawal of the suit in 1982. Given the launch of the Apple II in 1977, the IBM PC in 1981, and the entry of multiple “PC clones,” the forces of creative destruction swiftly displaced IBM from market leadership in the computing industry.
Regulators and legislators around the world have emphasized the urgency of taking dramatic action to correct claimed market failures in digital environments, casting aside prudential concerns over the consequences if any such failure proves to be illusory or temporary.
But the costs of regulatory failure can be significant and long-lasting. Markets must operate under unnecessary compliance burdens that are difficult to modify. Regulators’ enforcement resources are diverted, and businesses are barred from adopting practices that would benefit consumers. In particular, proposed breakup remedies advocated by some policymakers would undermine the scale economies that have enabled platforms to push down prices, an important consideration in a time of accelerating inflation.
Conclusion
The high concentration levels and certain business practices in digital-platform markets certainly raise important concerns as a matter of antitrust (as well as privacy, intellectual property, and other bodies of) law. These concerns merit scrutiny and may necessitate appropriately targeted interventions. Yet, any policy steps should be anchored in the factually grounded analysis that has characterized decades of regulatory and judicial action to implement the antitrust laws with appropriate care. Abandoning this nuanced framework for a blunt approach based on reflexive assumptions of market power is likely to undermine, rather than promote, the public interest in competitive markets.
In recent years, a diverse cross-section of advocates and politicians have leveled criticisms at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and its grant of legal immunity to interactive computer services. Proposed legislative changes to the law have been put forward by both Republicans and Democrats.
It remains unclear whether Congress (or the courts) will amend Section 230, but any changes are bound to expand the scope, uncertainty, and expense of content risks. That’s why it’s important that such changes be developed and implemented in ways that minimize their potential to significantly disrupt and harm online activity. This piece focuses on those insurable content risks that most frequently result in litigation and considers the effect of the direct and indirect costs caused by frivolous suits and lawfare, not just the ultimate potential for a court to find liability. The experience of the 1980s asbestos-litigation crisis offers a warning of what could go wrong.
Enacted in 1996, Section 230 was intended to promote the Internet as a diverse medium for discourse, cultural development, and intellectual activity by shielding interactive computer services from legal liability when blocking or filtering access to obscene, harassing, or otherwise objectionable content. Absent such immunity, a platform hosting content produced by third parties could be held equally responsible as the creator for claims alleging defamation or invasion of privacy.
In the current legislative debates, Section 230’s critics on the left argue that the law does not go far enough to combat hate speech and misinformation. Critics on the right claim the law protects censorship of dissenting opinions. Legal challenges to the current wording of Section 230 arise primarily from what constitutes an “interactive computer service,” “good faith” restriction of content, and the grant of legal immunity, regardless of whether the restricted material is constitutionally protected.
While Congress and various stakeholders debate various alternate statutory frameworks, several test cases simultaneously have been working their way through the judicial system and some states have either passed or are considering legislation to address complaints with Section 230. Some have suggested passing new federal legislation classifying online platforms as common carriers as an alternate approach that does not involve amending or repealing Section 230. Regardless of the form it may take, change to the status quo is likely to increase the risk of litigation and liability for those hosting or publishing third-party content.
The Nature of Content Risk
The class of individuals and organizations exposed to content risk has never been broader. Any information, content, or communication that is created, gathered, compiled, or amended can be considered “material” which, when disseminated to third parties, may be deemed “publishing.” Liability can arise from any step in that process. Those who republish material are generally held to the same standard of liability as if they were the original publisher. (See, e.g., Rest. (2d) of Torts § 578 with respect to defamation.)
Digitization has simultaneously reduced the cost and expertise required to publish material and increased the potential reach of that material. Where it was once limited to books, newspapers, and periodicals, “publishing” now encompasses such activities as creating and updating a website; creating a podcast or blog post; or even posting to social media. Much of this activity is performed by individuals and businesses who have only limited experience with the legal risks associated with publishing.
This is especially true regarding the use of third-party material, which is used extensively by both sophisticated and unsophisticated platforms. Platforms that host third-party-generated content—e.g., social media or websites with comment sections—have historically engaged in only limited vetting of that content, although this is changing. When combined with the potential to reach consumers far beyond the original platform and target audience—lasting digital traces that are difficult to identify and remove—and the need to comply with privacy and other statutory requirements, the potential for all manner of “publishers” to incur legal liability has never been higher.
Even sophisticated legacy publishers struggle with managing the litigation that arises from these risks. There are a limited number of specialist counsel, which results in higher hourly rates. Oversight of legal bills is not always effective, as internal counsel often have limited resources to manage their daily responsibilities and litigation. As a result, legal fees often make up as much as two-thirds of the average claims cost. Accordingly, defense spending and litigation management are indirect, but important, risks associated with content claims.
Effective risk management is any publisher’s first line of defense. The type and complexity of content risk management varies significantly by organization, based on its size, resources, activities, risk appetite, and sophistication. Traditional publishers typically have a formal set of editorial guidelines specifying policies governing the creation of content, pre-publication review, editorial-approval authority, and referral to internal and external legal counsel. They often maintain a library of standardized contracts; have a process to periodically review and update those wordings; and a process to verify the validity of a potential licensor’s rights. Most have formal controls to respond to complaints and to retraction/takedown requests.
Insuring Content Risks
Insurance is integral to most publishers’ risk-management plans. Content coverage is present, to some degree, in most general liability policies (i.e., for “advertising liability”). Specialized coverage—commonly referred to as “media” or “media E&O”—is available on a standalone basis or may be packaged with cyber-liability coverage. Terms of specialized coverage can vary significantly, but generally provides at least basic coverage for the three primary content risks of defamation, copyright infringement, and invasion of privacy.
Insureds typically retain the first dollar loss up to a specific dollar threshold. They may also retain a coinsurance percentage of every dollar thereafter in partnership with their insurer. For example, an insured may be responsible for the first $25,000 of loss, and for 10% of loss above that threshold. Such coinsurance structures often are used by insurers as a non-monetary tool to help control legal spending and to incentivize an organization to employ effective oversight of counsel’s billing practices.
The type and amount of loss retained will depend on the insured’s size, resources, risk profile, risk appetite, and insurance budget. Generally, but not always, increases in an insured’s retention or an insurer’s attachment (e.g., raising the threshold to $50,000, or raising the insured’s coinsurance to 15%) will result in lower premiums. Most insureds will seek the smallest retention feasible within their budget.
Contract limits (the maximum coverage payout available) will vary based on the same factors. Larger policyholders often build a “tower” of insurance made up of multiple layers of the same or similar coverage issued by different insurers. Two or more insurers may partner on the same “quota share” layer and split any loss incurred within that layer on a pre-agreed proportional basis.
Navigating the strategic choices involved in developing an insurance program can be complex, depending on an organization’s risks. Policyholders often use commercial brokers to aide them in developing an appropriate risk-management and insurance strategy that maximizes coverage within their budget and to assist with claims recoveries. This is particularly important for small and mid-sized insureds who may lack the sophistication or budget of larger organizations. Policyholders and brokers try to minimize the gaps in coverage between layers and among quota-share participants, but such gaps can occur, leaving a policyholder partially self-insured.
An organization’s options to insure its content risk may also be influenced by the dynamics of the overall insurance market or within specific content lines. Underwriters are not all created equal; it is a challenging responsibility requiring a level of prediction, and some underwriters may fail to adequately identify and account for certain risks. It can also be challenging to accurately measure risk aggregation and set appropriate reserves. An insurer’s appetite for certain lines and the availability of supporting reinsurance can fluctuate based on trends in the general capital markets. Specialty media/content coverage is a small niche within the global commercial insurance market, which makes insurers in this line more sensitive to these general trends.
Litigation Risks from Changes to Section 230
A full repeal or judicial invalidation of Section 230 generally would make every platform responsible for all the content they disseminate, regardless of who created the material requiring at least some additional editorial review. This would significantly disadvantage those platforms that host a significant volume of third-party content. Internet service providers, cable companies, social media, and product/service review companies would be put under tremendous strain, given the daily volume of content produced. To reduce the risk that they serve as a “deep pocket” target for plaintiffs, they would likely adopt more robust pre-publication screening of content and authorized third-parties; limit public interfaces; require registration before a user may publish content; employ more reactive complaint response/takedown policies; and ban problem users more frequently. Small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as those not focused primarily on the business of publishing, would likely avoid many interactive functions altogether.
A full repeal would be, in many ways, a blunderbuss approach to dealing with criticisms of Section 230, and would cause as many or more problems as it solves. In the current polarized environment, it also appears unlikely that Congress will reach bipartisan agreement on amended language for Section 230, or to classify interactive computer services as common carriers, given that the changes desired by the political left and right are so divergent. What may be more likely is that courts encounter a test case that prompts them to clarify the application of the existing statutory language—i.e., whether an entity was acting as a neutral platform or a content creator, whether its conduct was in “good faith,” and whether the material is “objectionable” within the meaning of the statute.
A relatively greater frequency of litigation is almost inevitable in the wake of any changes to the status quo, whether made by Congress or the courts. Major litigation would likely focus on those social-media platforms at the center of the Section 230 controversy, such as Facebook and Twitter, given their active role in these issues, deep pockets and, potentially, various admissions against interest helpful to plaintiffs regarding their level of editorial judgment. SMEs could also be affected in the immediate wake of a change to the statute or its interpretation. While SMEs are likely to be implicated on a smaller scale, the impact of litigation could be even more damaging to their viability if they are not adequately insured.
Over time, the boundaries of an amended Section 230’s application and any consequential effects should become clearer as courts develop application criteria and precedent is established for different fact patterns. Exposed platforms will likely make changes to their activities and risk-management strategies consistent with such developments. Operationally, some interactive features—such as comment sections or product and service reviews—may become less common.
In the short and medium term, however, a period of increased and unforeseen litigation to resolve these issues is likely to prove expensive and damaging. Insurers of content risks are likely to bear the brunt of any changes to Section 230, because these risks and their financial costs would be new, uncertain, and not incorporated into historical pricing of content risk.
Remembering the Asbestos Crisis
The introduction of a new exposure or legal risk can have significant financial effects on commercial insurance carriers. New and revised risks must be accounted for in the assumptions, probabilities, and load factors used in insurance pricing and reserving models. Even small changes in those values can have large aggregate effects, which may undermine confidence in those models, complicate obtaining reinsurance, or harm an insurer’s overall financial health.
For example, in the 1980s, certain courts adopted the triple-trigger and continuous trigger methods[1] of determining when a policyholder could access coverage under an “occurrence” policy for asbestos claims. As a result, insurers paid claims under policies dating back to the early 1900s and, in some cases, under all policies from that date until the date of the claim. Such policies were written when mesothelioma related to asbestos was unknown and not incorporated into the policy pricing.
Insurers had long-since released reserves from the decades-old policy years, so those resources were not available to pay claims. Nor could underwriters retroactively increase premiums for the intervening years and smooth out the cost of these claims. This created extreme financial stress for impacted insurers and reinsurers, with some ultimately rendered insolvent. Surviving carriers responded by drastically reducing coverage and increasing prices, which resulted in a major capacity shortage that resolved only after the creation of the Bermuda insurance and reinsurance market.
The asbestos-related liability crisis represented a perfect storm that is unlikely to be replicated. Given the ubiquitous nature of digital content, however, any drastic or misconceived changes to Section 230 protections could still cause significant disruption to the commercial insurance market.
Content risk is covered, at least in part, by general liability and many cyber policies, but it is not currently a primary focus for underwriters. Specialty media underwriters are more likely to be monitoring Section 230 risk, but the highly competitive market will make it difficult for them to respond to any changes with significant price increases. In addition, the current market environment for U.S. property and casualty insurance generally is in the midst of correcting for years of inadequate pricing, expanding coverage, developing exposures, and claims inflation. It would be extremely difficult to charge an adequate premium increase if the potential severity of content risk were to increase suddenly.
In the face of such risk uncertainty and challenges to adequately increasing premiums, underwriters would likely seek to reduce their exposure to online content risks, i.e., by reducing the scope of coverage, reducing limits, and increasing retentions. How these changes would manifest, and the pain for all involved, would likely depend on how quickly such changes in policyholders’ risk profiles manifest.
Small or specialty carriers caught unprepared could be forced to exit the market if they experienced a sharp spike in claims or unexpected increase in needed reserves. Larger, multiline carriers may respond by voluntarily reducing or withdrawing their participation in this space. Insurers exposed to ancillary content risk may simply exclude it from cover if adequate price increases are impractical. Such reactions could result in content coverage becoming harder to obtain or unavailable altogether. This, in turn, would incentivize organizations to limit or avoid certain digital activities.
Finding a More Thoughtful Approach
The tension between calls for reform of Section 230 and the potential for disrupting online activity does not mean that political leaders and courts should ignore these issues. Rather, it means that what’s required is a thoughtful, clear, and predictable approach to any changes, with the goal of maximizing the clarity of the changes and their application and minimizing any resulting litigation. Regardless of whether accomplished through legislation or the judicial process, addressing the following issues could minimize the duration and severity of any period of harmful disruption regarding content-risk:
Presumptive immunity – Including an express statement in the definition of “interactive computer service,” or inferring one judicially, to clarify that platforms hosting third-party content enjoy a rebuttable presumption that statutory immunity applies would discourage frivolous litigation as courts establish precedent defining the applicability of any other revisions.
Specify the grounds for losing immunity – Clarify, at a minimum, what constitutes “good faith” with respect to content restrictions and further clarify what material is or is not “objectionable,” as it relates to newsworthy content or actions that trigger loss of immunity.
Specify the scope and duration of any loss of immunity – Clarify whether the loss of immunity is total, categorical, or specific to the situation under review and the duration of that loss of immunity, if applicable.
Reinstatement of immunity, subject to burden-shifting – Clarify what a platform must do to reinstate statutory immunity on a go-forward basis and clarify that it bears the burden of proving its go-forward conduct entitled it to statutory protection.
Address associated issues – Any clarification or interpretation should address other issues likely to arise, such as the effect and weight to be given to a platform’s application of its community standards, adherence to neutral takedown/complain procedures, etc. Care should be taken to avoid overcorrecting and creating a “heckler’s veto.”
Deferred effect – If change is made legislatively, the effective date should be deferred for a reasonable time to allow platforms sufficient opportunity to adjust their current risk-management policies, contractual arrangements, content publishing and storage practices, and insurance arrangements in a thoughtful, orderly fashion that accounts for the new rules.
Ultimately, legislative and judicial stakeholders will chart their own course to address the widespread dissatisfaction with Section 230. More important than any of these specific policy suggestions is the principle underpins them: that any changes incorporate due consideration for the potential direct and downstream harm that can be caused if policy is not clear, comprehensive, and designed to minimize unnecessary litigation.
It is no surprise that, in the years since Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was passed, the environment and risks associated with digital platforms have evolved or that those changes have created a certain amount of friction in the law’s application. Policymakers should employ a holistic approach when evaluating their legislative and judicial options to revise or clarify the application of Section 230. Doing so in a targeted, predictable fashion should help to mitigate or avoid the risk of increased litigation and other unintended consequences that might otherwise prove harmful to online platforms in the commercial insurance market.
Aaron Tilley is a senior insurance executive with more than 16 years of commercial insurance experience in executive management, underwriting, legal, and claims working in or with the U.S., Bermuda, and London markets. He has served as chief underwriting officer of a specialty media E&O and cyber-liability insurer and as coverage counsel representing international insurers with respect to a variety of E&O and advertising liability claims
[1] The triple-trigger method allowed a policy to be accessed based on the date of the injury-in-fact, manifestation of injury, or exposure to substances known to cause injury. The continuous trigger allowed all policies issued by an insurer, not just one, to be accessed if a triggering event could be established during the policy period.
In his recent concurrence in Biden v. Knight, Justice Clarence Thomas sketched a roadmap for how to regulate social-media platforms. The animating factor for Thomas, much like for other conservatives, appears to be a sense that Big Tech has exhibited anti-conservative bias in its moderation decisions, most prominently by excluding former President Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook. The opinion has predictably been greeted warmly by conservative champions of social-media regulation, who believe it shows how states and the federal government can proceed on this front.
While much of the commentary to date has been on whether Thomas got the legal analysisright, or on the uncomfortable fit of common-carriage law to social media, the deeper question of the First Amendment’s protection of private ordering has received relatively short shrift.
Conservatives’ main argument has been that Big Tech needs to be reined in because it is restricting the speech of private individuals. While conservatives traditionally have defended the state-action doctrine and the right to editorial discretion, they now readily find exceptions to both in order to justify regulating social-media companies. But those two First Amendment doctrines have long enshrined an important general principle: private actors can set the rules for speech on their own property. I intend to analyze this principle from a law & economics perspective and show how it benefits society.
Who Balances the Benefits and Costs of Speech?
Like virtually any other human activity, there are benefits and costs to speech and it is ultimately subjective individual preference that determines the value that speech has. The First Amendment protects speech from governmental regulation, with only limited exceptions, but that does not mean all speech is acceptable or must be tolerated. Under the state-action doctrine, the First Amendment only prevents the government from restricting speech.
Some purported defenders of the principle of free speech no longer appear to see a distinction between restraints on speech imposed by the government and those imposed by private actors. But this is surely mistaken, as no one truly believes all speech protected by the First Amendment should be without consequence. In truth, most regulation of speech has always come by informal means—social mores enforced by dirty looks or responsive speech from others.
Moreover, property rights have long played a crucial role in determining speech rules within any given space. If a man were to come into my house and start calling my wife racial epithets, I would not only ask that person to leave but would exercise my right as a property owner to eject the trespasser—if necessary, calling the police to assist me. I similarly could not expect to go to a restaurant and yell at the top of my lungs about political issues and expect them—even as “common carriers” or places of public accommodation—to allow me to continue.
The fact that different costs and benefits must be balanced does not in itself imply who must balance them―or even that there must be a single balance for all, or a unitary viewpoint (one “we”) from which the issue is categorically resolved.
Knowledge and Decisions, p. 240
When it comes to speech, the balance that must be struck is between one individual’s desire for an audience and that prospective audience’s willingness to play the role. Asking government to use regulation to make categorical decisions for all of society is substituting centralized evaluation of the costs and benefits of access to communications for the individual decisions of many actors. Rather than incremental decisions regarding how and under what terms individuals may relate to one another—which can evolve over time in response to changes in what individuals find acceptable—government by its nature can only hand down categorical guidelines: “you must allow x, y, and z speech.”
This is particularly relevant in the sphere of social media. Social-media companies are multi-sided platforms. They are profit-seeking, to be sure, but the way they generate profits is by acting as intermediaries between users and advertisers. If they fail to serve their users well, those users could abandon the platform. Without users, advertisers would have no interest in buying ads. And without advertisers, there is no profit to be made. Social-media companies thus need to maximize the value of their platform by setting rules that keep users engaged.
In the cases of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the platforms have set content-moderation standards that restrict many kinds of speech that are generally viewed negatively by users, even if the First Amendment would foreclose the government from regulating those same types of content. This is a good thing. Social-media companies balance the speech interests of different kinds of users to maximize the value of the platform and, in turn, to maximize benefits to all.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between private action and state action: one is voluntary, and the other based on coercion. If Facebook or Twitter suspends a user for violating community rules, it represents termination of a previously voluntary association. If the government kicks someone out of a public forum for expressing legal speech, that is coercion. The state-action doctrine recognizes this fundamental difference and creates a bright-line rule that courts may police when it comes to speech claims. As Sowell put it:
The courts’ role as watchdogs patrolling the boundaries of governmental power is essential in order that others may be secure and free on the other side of those boundaries. But what makes watchdogs valuable is precisely their ability to distinguish those people who are to be kept at bay and those who are to be left alone. A watchdog who could not make that distinction would not be a watchdog at all, but simply a general menace.
Knowledge and Decisions, p. 244
Markets Produce the Best Moderation Policies
The First Amendment also protects the right of editorial discretion, which means publishers, platforms, and other speakers are free from carrying or transmitting government-compelled speech. Even a newspaper with near-monopoly power cannot be compelled by a right-of-reply statute to carry responses by political candidates to editorials it has published. In other words, not only is private regulation of speech not state action, but in many cases, private regulation is protected by the First Amendment.
There is no reason to think that social-media companies today are in a different position than was the newspaper in Miami Herald v. Tornillo. These companies must determine what, how, and where content is presented within their platform. While this right of editorial discretion protects the moderation decisions of social-media companies, its benefits accrue to society at-large.
Social-media companies’ abilities to differentiate themselves based on functionality and moderation policies are important aspects of competition among them. How each platform is used may differ depending on those factors. In fact, many consumers use multiple social-media platforms throughout the day for different purposes. Market competition, not government power, has enabled internet users (including conservatives!) to have more avenues than ever to get their message out.
Many conservatives remain unpersuaded by the power of markets in this case. They see multiple platforms all engaging in very similar content-moderation policies when it comes to certain touchpoint issues, and thus allege widespread anti-conservative bias and collusion. Neither of those claims have much factual support, but more importantly, the similarity of content-moderation standards may simply be common responses to similar demand structures—not some nefarious and conspiratorial plot.
In other words, if social-media users demand less of the kinds of content commonly considered to be hate speech, or less misinformation on certain important issues, platforms will do their best to weed those things out. Platforms won’t always get these determinations right, but it is by no means clear that forcing them to carry all “legal” speech—which would include not just misinformation and hate speech, but pornographic material, as well—would better serve social-media users. There are always alternative means to debate contestable issues of the day, even if it may be more costly to access them.
Indeed, that content-moderation policies make it more difficult to communicate some messages is precisely the point of having them. There is a subset of protected speech to which many users do not wish to be subject. Moreover, there is no inherent right to have an audience on a social-media platform.
Conclusion
Much of the First Amendment’s economic value lies in how it defines roles in the market for speech. As a general matter, it is not the government’s place to determine what speech should be allowed in private spaces. Instead, the private ordering of speech emerges through the application of social mores and property rights. This benefits society, as it allows individuals to create voluntary relationships built on marginal decisions about what speech is acceptable when and where, rather than centralized decisions made by a governing few and that are difficult to change over time.
In what has become regularly scheduled programming on Capitol Hill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be subject to yet another round of congressional grilling—this time, about the platforms’ content-moderation policies—during a March 25 joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The stated purpose of this latest bit of political theatre is to explore, as made explicit in the hearing’s title, “social media’s role in promoting extremism and misinformation.” Specific topics are expected to include proposed changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, heightened scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, and misinformation about COVID-19—the subject of new legislation introduced by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii).
But while many in the Democratic majority argue that social media companies have not done enough to moderate misinformation or hate speech, it is a problem with no realistic legal fix. Any attempt to mandate removal of speech on grounds that it is misinformation or hate speech, either directly or indirectly, would run afoul of the First Amendment.
Misinformation Is Usually Legal
Much of the recent focus has been on misinformation spread on social media about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. The memorandum for the March 25 hearing sums it up:
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have long come under fire for their role in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and extremist content. For instance, since the beginning of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, all three platforms have spread substantial amounts of misinformation about COVID-19. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, disinformation regarding the severity of the virus and the effectiveness of alleged cures for COVID-19 was widespread. More recently, COVID-19 disinformation has misrepresented the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have also been distributors for years of election disinformation that appeared to be intended either to improperly influence or undermine the outcomes of free and fair elections. During the November 2016 election, social media platforms were used by foreign governments to disseminate information to manipulate public opinion. This trend continued during and after the November 2020 election, often fomented by domestic actors, with rampant disinformation about voter fraud, defective voting machines, and premature declarations of victory.
It is true that, despite social media companies’ efforts to label and remove false content and bar some of the biggest purveyors, there remains a considerable volume of false information on social media. But U.S. Supreme Court precedent consistently has limited government regulation of false speech to distinct categories like defamation, perjury, and fraud.
The Case of Stolen Valor
The court’s 2011 decision in United States v. Alvarez struck down as unconstitutional the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a federal crime to falsely claim to have earned a military medal. A four-justice plurality opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, along with a two-justice concurrence, both agreed that a statement being false did not, by itself, exclude it from First Amendment protection.
Kennedy’s opinion noted that while the government may impose penalties for false speech connected with the legal process (perjury or impersonating a government official); with receiving a benefit (fraud); or with harming someone’s reputation (defamation); the First Amendment does not sanction penalties for false speech, in and of itself. The plurality exhibited particular skepticism toward the notion that government actors could be entrusted as a “Ministry of Truth,” empowered to determine what categories of false speech should be made illegal:
Permitting the government to decree this speech to be a criminal offense, whether shouted from the rooftops or made in a barely audible whisper, would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable. That governmental power has no clear limiting principle. Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth… Were this law to be sustained, there could be an endless list of subjects the National Government or the States could single out… Were the Court to hold that the interest in truthful discourse alone is sufficient to sustain a ban on speech, absent any evidence that the speech was used to gain a material advantage, it would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom. [EMPHASIS ADDED]
As noted in the opinion, declaring false speech illegal constitutes a content-based restriction subject to “exacting scrutiny.” Applying that standard, the court found “the link between the Government’s interest in protecting the integrity of the military honors system and the Act’s restriction on the false claims of liars like respondent has not been shown.”
While finding that the government “has not shown, and cannot show, why counterspeech would not suffice to achieve its interest,” the plurality suggested a more narrowly tailored solution could be simply to publish Medal of Honor recipients in an online database. In other words, the government could overcome the problem of false speech by promoting true speech.
In 2012, President Barack Obama signed an updated version of the Stolen Valor Act that limited its penalties to situations where a misrepresentation is shown to result in receipt of some kind of benefit. That places the false speech in the category of fraud, consistent with the Alvarez opinion.
A Social Media Ministry of Truth
Applying the Alvarez standard to social media, the government could (and already does) promote its interest in public health or election integrity by publishing true speech through official channels. But there is little reason to believe the government at any level could regulate access to misinformation. Anything approaching an outright ban on accessing speech deemed false by the government not only would not be the most narrowly tailored way to deal with such speech, but it is bound to have chilling effects even on true speech.
The analysis doesn’t change if the government instead places Big Tech itself in the position of Ministry of Truth. Some propose making changes to Section 230, which currently immunizes social media companies from liability for user speech (with limited exceptions), regardless what moderation policies the platform adopts. A hypothetical change might condition Section 230’s liability shield on platforms agreeing to moderate certain categories of misinformation. But that would still place the government in the position of coercing platforms to take down speech.
Even the “fix” of making social media companies liable for user speech they amplify through promotions on the platform, as proposed by Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-Va.) SAFE TECH Act, runs into First Amendment concerns. The aim of the bill is to regard sponsored content as constituting speech made by the platform, thus opening the platform to liability for the underlying misinformation. But any such liability also would be limited to categories of speech that fall outside First Amendment protection, like fraud or defamation. This would not appear to include most of the types of misinformation on COVID-19 or election security that animate the current legislative push.
There is no way for the government to regulate misinformation, in and of itself, consistent with the First Amendment. Big Tech companies are free to develop their own policies against misinformation, but the government may not force them to do so.
Extremely Limited Room to Regulate Extremism
The Big Tech CEOs are also almost certain to be grilled about the use of social media to spread “hate speech” or “extremist content.” The memorandum for the March 25 hearing sums it up like this:
Facebook executives were repeatedly warned that extremist content was thriving on their platform, and that Facebook’s own algorithms and recommendation tools were responsible for the appeal of extremist groups and divisive content. Similarly, since 2015, videos from extremists have proliferated on YouTube; and YouTube’s algorithm often guides users from more innocuous or alternative content to more fringe channels and videos. Twitter has been criticized for being slow to stop white nationalists from organizing, fundraising, recruiting and spreading propaganda on Twitter.
Social media has often played host to racist, sexist, and other types of vile speech. While social media companies have community standards and other policies that restrict “hate speech” in some circumstances, there is demand from some public officials that they do more. But under a First Amendment analysis, regulating hate speech on social media would fare no better than the regulation of misinformation.
The First Amendment doesn’t allow for the regulation of “hate speech” as its own distinct category. Hate speech is, in fact, as protected as any other type of speech. There are some limited exceptions, as the First Amendment does not protect incitement, true threats of violence, or “fighting words.” Some of these flatly do not apply in the online context. “Fighting words,” for instance, applies only in face-to-face situations to “those personally abusive epithets which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction.”
One relevant precedent is the court’s 1992 decision in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, which considered a local ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota, prohibiting public expressions that served to cause “outrage, alarm, or anger with respect to racial, gender or religious intolerance.” A juvenile was charged with violating the ordinance when he created a makeshift cross and lit it on fire in front of a black family’s home. The court unanimously struck down the ordinance as a violation of the First Amendment, finding it an impermissible content-based restraint that was not limited to incitement or true threats.
By contrast, in 2003’s Virginia v. Black, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law outlawing cross burnings done with the intent to intimidate. The court’s opinion distinguished R.A.V. on grounds that the Virginia statute didn’t single out speech regarding disfavored topics. Instead, it was aimed at speech that had the intent to intimidate regardless of the victim’s race, gender, religion, or other characteristic. But the court was careful to limit government regulation of hate speech to instances that involve true threats or incitement.
When it comes to incitement, the legal standard was set by the court’s landmark Brandenberg v. Ohiodecision in 1969, which laid out that:
the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. [EMPHASIS ADDED]
In other words, while “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment, specific types of speech that convey true threats or fit under the related doctrine of incitement are not. The government may regulate those types of speech. And they do. In fact, social media users can be, and often are, charged with crimes for threats made online. But the government can’t issue a per se ban on hate speech or “extremist content.”
Just as with misinformation, the government also can’t condition Section 230 immunity on platforms removing hate speech. Insofar as speech is protected under the First Amendment, the government can’t specifically condition a government benefit on its removal. Even the SAFE TECH Act’s model for holding platforms accountable for amplifying hate speech or extremist content would have to be limited to speech that amounts to true threats or incitement. This is a far narrower category of hateful speech than the examples that concern legislators.
Social media companies do remain free under the law to moderate hateful content as they see fit under their terms of service. Section 230 immunity is not dependent on whether companies do or don’t moderate such content, or on how they define hate speech. But government efforts to step in and define hate speech would likely run into First Amendment problems unless they stay focused on unprotected threats and incitement.
What Can the Government Do?
One may fairly ask what it is that governments can do to combat misinformation and hate speech online. The answer may be a law that requires takedowns by court order of speech after it is declared illegal, as proposed by the PACT Act, sponsored in the last session by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R-S.D.). Such speech may, in some circumstances, include misinformation or hate speech.
But as outlined above, the misinformation that the government can regulate is limited to situations like fraud or defamation, while the hate speech it can regulate is limited to true threats and incitement. A narrowly tailored law that looked to address those specific categories may or may not be a good idea, but it would likely survive First Amendment scrutiny, and may even prove a productive line of discussion with the tech CEOs.
In the latest congressional hearing, purportedly analyzing Google’s “stacking the deck” in the online advertising marketplace, much of the opening statement and questioning by Senator Mike Lee and later questioning by Senator Josh Hawley focused on an episode of alleged anti-conservative bias by Google in threatening to demonetize The Federalist, a conservative publisher, unless they exercised a greater degree of control over its comments section. The senators connected this to Google’s “dominance,” arguing that it is only because Google’s ad services are essential that Google can dictate terms to a conservative website. A similar impulse motivates Section 230 reform efforts as well: allegedly anti-conservative online platforms wield their dominance to censor conservative speech, either through deplatforming or demonetization.
Before even getting into the analysis of how to incorporate political bias into antitrust analysis, though, it should be noted that there likely is no viable antitrust remedy. Even aside from the Section 230 debate, online platforms like Google are First Amendment speakers who have editorial discretion over their sites and apps, much like newspapers. An antitrust remedy compelling these companies to carry speech they disagree with would almost certainly violate the First Amendment.
But even aside from the First Amendment aspect of this debate, there is no easy way to incorporate concerns about political bias into antitrust. Perhaps the best way to understand this argument in the antitrust sense is as a non-price effects analysis.
Political bias could be seen by end consumers as an important aspect of product quality. Conservatives have made the case that not only Google, but also Facebook and Twitter, have discriminated against conservative voices. The argument would then follow that consumer welfare is harmed when these dominant platforms leverage their control of the social media marketplace into the marketplace of ideas by censoring voices with whom they disagree.
While this has theoretical plausibility, there are real practical difficulties. As Geoffrey Manne and I have written previously, in the context of incorporating privacy into antitrust analysis:
The Horizontal Merger Guidelines have long recognized that anticompetitive effects may “be manifested in non-price terms and conditions that adversely affect customers.” But this notion, while largely unobjectionable in the abstract, still presents significant problems in actual application.
First, product quality effects can be extremely difficult to distinguish from price effects. Quality-adjusted price is usually the touchstone by which antitrust regulators assess prices for competitive effects analysis. Disentangling (allegedly) anticompetitive quality effects from simultaneous (neutral or pro-competitive) price effects is an imprecise exercise, at best. For this reason, proving a product-quality case alone is very difficult and requires connecting the degradation of a particular element of product quality to a net gain in advantage for the monopolist.
Second, invariably product quality can be measured on more than one dimension. For instance, product quality could include both function and aesthetics: A watch’s quality lies in both its ability to tell time as well as how nice it looks on your wrist. A non-price effects analysis involving product quality across multiple dimensions becomes exceedingly difficult if there is a tradeoff in consumer welfare between the dimensions. Thus, for example, a smaller watch battery may improve its aesthetics, but also reduce its reliability. Any such analysis would necessarily involve a complex and imprecise comparison of the relative magnitudes of harm/benefit to consumers who prefer one type of quality to another.
Just as with privacy and other product qualities, the analysis becomes increasingly complex first when tradeoffs between price and quality are introduced, and then even more so when tradeoffs between what different consumer groups perceive as quality is added. In fact, it is more complex than privacy. All but the most exhibitionistic would prefer more to less privacy, all other things being equal. But with political media consumption, most would prefer to have more of what they want to read available, even if it comes at the expense of what others may want. There is no easy way to understand what consumer welfare means in a situation where one group’s preferences need to come at the expense of another’s in moderation decisions.
Consider the case of The Federalist again. The allegation is that Google is imposing their anticonservative bias by “forcing” the website to clean up its comments section. The argument is that since The Federalist needs Google’s advertising money, it must play by Google’s rules. And since it did so, there is now one less avenue for conservative speech.
What this argument misses is the balance Google and other online services must strike as multi-sided platforms. The goal is to connect advertisers on one side of the platform, to the users on the other. If a site wants to take advantage of the ad network, it seems inevitable that intermediaries like Google will need to create rules about what can and can’t be shown or they run the risk of losing advertisers who don’t want to be associated with certain speech or conduct. For instance, most companies don’t want to be associated with racist commentary. Thus, they will take great pains to make sure they don’t sponsor or place ads in venues associated with racism. Online platforms connecting advertisers to potential consumers must take that into consideration.
Users, like those who frequent The Federalist, have unpriced access to content across those sites and apps which are part of ad networks like Google’s. Other models, like paid subscriptions (which The Federalist also has available), are also possible. But it isn’t clear that conservative voices or conservative consumers have been harmed overall by the option of unpriced access on one side of the platform, with advertisers paying on the other side. If anything, it seems the opposite is the case since conservatives long complained about legacy media having a bias and lauded the Internet as an opportunity to gain a foothold in the marketplace of ideas.
Online platforms like Google must balance the interests of users from across the political spectrum. If their moderation practices are too politically biased in one direction or another, users could switch to another online platform with one click or swipe. Assuming online platforms wish to maximize revenue, they will have a strong incentive to limit political bias from its moderation practices. The ease of switching to another platform which markets itself as more free speech-friendly, like Parler, shows entrepreneurs can take advantage of market opportunities if Google and other online platforms go too far with political bias.
While one could perhaps argue that the major online platforms are colluding to keep out conservative voices, this is difficult to square with the different moderation practices each employs, as well as the data that suggests conservative voices are consistently among the most shared on Facebook.
Antitrust is not a cure-all law. Conservatives who normally understand this need to reconsider whether antitrust is really well-suited for litigating concerns about anti-conservative bias online.
Recently-published emails from 2012 between Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s then-Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, in which Zuckerberg lays out his rationale for buying Instagram, have prompted many to speculate that the deal may not have been cleared had antitrust agencies had had access to Facebook’s internal documents at the time.
The issue is Zuckerberg’s description of Instagram as a nascent competitor and potential threat to Facebook:
These businesses are nascent but the networks established, the brands are already meaningful, and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us. Given that we think our own valuation is fairly aggressive and that we’re vulnerable in mobile, I’m curious if we should consider going after one or two of them.
Ebersman objects that a new rival would just enter the market if Facebook bought Instagram. In response, Zuckerberg wrote:
There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.
These email exchanges may not paint a particularly positive picture of Zuckerberg’s intent in doing the merger, and it is possible that at the time they may have caused antitrust agencies to scrutinise the merger more carefully. But they do not tell us that the acquisition was ultimately harmful to consumers, or about the counterfactual of the merger being blocked. While we know that Instagram became enormously popular in the years following the merger, it is not clear that it would have been just as successful without the deal, or that Facebook and its other products would be less popular today.
Moreover, it fails to account for the fact that Facebook had the resources to quickly scale Instagram up to a level that provided immediate benefits to an enormous number of users, instead of waiting for the app to potentially grow to such scale organically.
The rationale
Writing for Pro Market, Randy Picker argued that these emails hint that the acquisition was essentially about taking out a nascent competitor:
Buying Instagram really was about controlling the window in which the Instagram social mechanic invention posed a risk to Facebook … Facebook well understood the competitive risk posed by Instagram and how purchasing it would control that risk.
This is a plausible interpretation of the internal emails, although there are others. For instance, Zuckerberg also seems to say that the purpose is to use Instagram to improve Facebook to make it good enough to fend off other entrants:
If we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
If this was the rationale, rather than simply trying to kill a nascent competitor, it would be pro-competitive. It is good for consumers if a product makes itself better to beat its rivals by acquiring undervalued assets to deploy them at greater scale and with superior managerial efficiency, even if the acquirer hopes that in doing so it will prevent rivals from ever gaining significant market share.
Further, despite popular characterization, on its face the acquisition was not about trying to destroy a consumer option, but only to ensure that Facebook was competitively viable in providing that option. Another reasonable interpretation of the emails is that Facebook was wrestling with the age-old make-or-buy dilemma faced by every firm at some point or another.
Was the merger anticompetitive?
But let us assume that eliminating competition from Instagram was indeed the merger’s sole rationale. Would that necessarily make it anticompetitive?
Chief among the objections is that both Facebook and Instagram are networked goods. Their value to each user depends, to a significant extent, on the number (and quality) of other people using the same platform. Many scholars have argued that this can create self-reinforcing dynamics where the strong grow stronger – though such an outcome is certainly not a given, since other factors about the service matter too, and networks can suffer from diseconomies of scale as well, where new users reduce the quality of the network.
This network effects point is central to the reasoning of those who oppose the merger: Facebook purportedly acquired Instagram because Instagram’s network had grown large enough to be a threat. With Instagram out of the picture, Facebook could thus take on the remaining smaller rivals with the advantage of its own much larger installed base of users.
However, this network tipping argument could cut both ways. It is plausible that the proper counterfactual was not duopoly competition between Facebook and Instagram, but either Facebook or Instagram offering both firms’ features (only later). In other words, a possible framing of the merger is that it merely accelerated the cross-pollination of social mechanics between Facebook and Instagram. Something that would likely prove beneficial to consumers.
This finds some support in Mark Zuckerberg’s reply to David Ebersman:
Buying them would give us the people and time to integrate their innovations into our core products.
The exchange between Zuckerberg and Ebersman also suggests another pro-competitive justification: bringing Instagram’s “social mechanics” to Facebook’s much larger network of users. We can only speculate about what ‘social mechanics’ Zuckerberg actually had in mind, but at the time Facebook’s photo sharing functionality was largely based around albums of unedited photos, whereas Instagram’s core product was a stream of filtered, cropped single images.
Zuckerberg’s plan to gradually bring these features to Facebook’s users – as opposed to them having to familiarize themselves with an entirely different platform – would likely cut in favor of the deal being cleared by enforcers.
Another possibility is that it was Instagram’s network of creators – the people who had begun to use Instagram as a new medium, distinct from the generic photo albums Facebook had, and who would eventually grow to be known as ‘influencers’ – who were the valuable thing. Bringing them onto the Facebook platform would undoubtedly increase its value to regular users. For example, Kim Kardashian, one of Instagram’s most popular users, joined the service in February 2012, two months before the deal went through, and she was not the first such person to adopt Instagram in this way. We can see the importance of a service’s most creative users today, as Facebook is actually trying to pay TikTok creators to move to its TikTok clone Reels.
But if this was indeed the rationale, not only is this a sign of a company in the midst of fierce competition – rather than one on the cusp of acquiring a monopoly position – but, more fundamentally, it suggests that Facebook was always going to come out on top. Or at least it thought so.
The benefit of hindsight
Today’s commentators have the benefit of hindsight. This inherently biases contemporary takes on the Facebook/Instagram merger. For instance, it seems almost self-evident with hindsight that Facebook would succeed and that entry in the social media space would only occur at the fringes of existing platforms (the combined Facebook/Instagram platform) – think of the emergence of TikTok. However, at the time of the merger, such an outcome was anything but a foregone conclusion.
For instance, critics argue that Instagram no longer competes with Facebook because of the merger. However, it is equally plausible that Instagram only became so successful because of its combination with Facebook (notably thanks to the addition of Facebook’s advertising platform, and the rapid rollout of a stories feature in response to Snapchat’s rise). Indeed, Instagram grew from roughly 24 million at the time of the acquisition to over 1 Billion users in 2018. Likewise, it earned zero revenue at the time of the merger. This might explain why the acquisition was widely derided at the time.
This is critical from an antitrust perspective. Antitrust enforcers adjudicate merger proceedings in the face of extreme uncertainty. All possible outcomes, including the counterfactual setting, have certain probabilities of being true that enforcers and courts have to make educated guesses about, assigning probabilities to potential anticompetitive harms, merger efficiencies, and so on.
Authorities at the time of the merger could not ignore these uncertainties. What was the likelihood that a company with a fraction of Facebook’s users (24 million to Facebook’s 1 billion), and worth $1 billion, could grow to threaten Facebook’s market position? At the time, the answer seemed to be “very unlikely”. Moreover, how could authorities know that Google+ (Facebook’s strongest competitor at the time) would fail? These outcomes were not just hard to ascertain, they were simply unknowable.
Of course, this is preceisly what neo-Brandesian antitrust scholars object to today: among the many seemingly innocuous big tech acquisitions that are permitted each year, there is bound to be at least one acquired firm that might have been a future disruptor. True as this may be, identifying that one successful company among all the others is the antitrust equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. Instagram simply did not fit that description at the time of the merger. Such a stance also ignores the very real benefits that may arise from such arrangements.
Closing remarks
While it is tempting to reassess the Facebook Instagram merger in light of new revelations, such an undertaking is not without pitfalls. Hindsight bias is perhaps the most obvious, but the difficulties run deeper.
If we think that the Facebook/Instagram merger has been and will continue to be good for consumers, it would be strange to think that we should nevertheless break them up because we discovered that Zuckerberg had intended to do things that would harm consumers. Conversely, if you think a breakup would be good for consumers today, would it change your mind if you discovered that Mark Zuckerberg had the intentions of an angel when he went ahead with the merger in 2012, or that he had angelic intent today?
Ultimately, merger review involves making predictions about the future. While it may be reasonable to take the intentions of the merging parties into consideration when making those predictions (although it’s not obvious that we should), these are not the only or best ways to determine what the future will hold. As Ebersman himself points out in the emails, history is filled with over-optimistic mergers that failed to deliver benefits to the merging parties. That this one succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of everyone involved – except maybe Mark Zuckerberg – does not tell us that competition agencies should have ruled on it differently.
[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.
This post is authored by Dirk Auer, (Senior Researcher, Liege Competition & Innovation Institute; Senior Fellow, ICLE).]
Across the globe, millions of people are rapidly coming to terms with the harsh realities of life under lockdown. As governments impose ever-greater social distancing measures, many of the daily comforts we took for granted are no longer available to us.
And yet, we can all take solace in the knowledge that our current predicament would have been far less tolerable if the COVID-19 outbreak had hit us twenty years ago. Among others, we have Big Tech firms to thank for this silver lining.
Contrary to the claims of critics, such as Senator Josh Hawley, Big Tech has produced game-changing innovations that dramatically improve our ability to fight COVID-19.
The previous post in this series showed that innovations produced by Big Tech provide us with critical information, allow us to maintain some level of social interactions (despite living under lockdown), and have enabled companies, universities and schools to continue functioning (albeit at a severely reduced pace).
But apart from information, social interactions, and online working (and learning); what has Big Tech ever done for us?
One of the most underappreciated ways in which technology (mostly pioneered by Big Tech firms) is helping the world deal with COVID-19 has been a rapid shift towards contactless economic transactions. Not only are consumers turning towards digital goods to fill their spare time, but physical goods (most notably food) are increasingly being exchanged without any direct contact.
These ongoing changes would be impossible without the innovations and infrastructure that have emerged from tech and telecommunications companies over the last couple of decades.
Of course, the overall picture is still bleak. The shift to contactless transactions has only slightly softened the tremendous blow suffered by the retail and restaurant industries – some predictions suggest their overall revenue could fall by at least 50% in the second quarter of 2020. Nevertheless, as explained below, this situation would likely be significantly worse without the many innovations produced by Big Tech companies. For that we would be thankful.
1. Food and other goods
For a start, the COVID-19 outbreak (and government measures to combat it) has caused many brick & mortar stores and restaurants to shut down. These closures would have been far harder to implement before the advent of online retail and food delivery platforms.
At the time of writing, e-commerce websites already appear to have witnessed a 20-30% increase in sales (other sources report 52% increase, compared to the same time last year). This increase will likely continue in the coming months.
The Amazon Retail platform has been at the forefront of this online shift.
Having witnessed a surge in online shopping, Amazon announced that it would be hiring 100.000 distribution workers to cope with the increased demand. Amazon’s staff have also been asked to work overtime in order to meet increased demand (in exchange, Amazon has doubled their pay for overtime hours).
To attract these new hires and ensure that existing ones continue working, Amazon simultaneously announced that it would be increasing wages in virus-hit countries (from $15 to $17, in the US) .
Amazon also stopped accepting “non-essential” goods in its warehouses, in order to prioritize the sale of household essentials and medical goods that are in high demand.
Finally, in Italy, Amazon decided not to stop its operations, despite some employees testing positive for COVID-19. Controversial as this move may be, Amazon’s private interests are aligned with those of society – maintaining the supply of essential goods is now more important than ever.
And it is not just Amazon that is seeking to fill the breach left temporarily by brick & mortar retail. Other retailers are also stepping up efforts to distribute their goods online.
The apps of traditional retail chains have witnessed record daily downloads (thus relying on the smartphone platforms pioneered by Google and Apple).
Walmart has become the go-to choice for online food purchases:
Given the drastically lower activity within their brick & mortar stores, Walmart and Target, among others, have announced they would make their parking lots available for drive-thru testing.
The shift to online shopping mimics what occurred in China, during its own COVID-19 lockdown.
According to an article published in HBR, e-commerce penetration reached 36.6% of retail sales in China (compared to 29.7% in 2019). The same article explains how Alibaba’s technology is enabling traditional retailers to better manage their supply chains, ultimately helping them to sell their goods online.
A study by Nielsen ratings found that 67% of retailers would expand online channels.
Spurred by compassion and/or a desire to boost its brand abroad, Alibaba and its founder, Jack Ma, have made large efforts to provide critical medical supplies (notably tests kits and surgical masks) to COVID-hit countries such as the US and Belgium.
And it is not just retail that is adapting to the outbreak. Many restaurants are trying to stay afloat by shifting from in-house dining to deliveries. These attempts have been made possible by the emergence of food delivery platforms, such as UberEats and Deliveroo.
These platforms have taken several steps to facilitate food deliveries during the outbreak.
UberEats announced that it would be waiving delivery fees for independent restaurants.
Both UberEats and Deliveroo have put in place systems for deliveries to take place without direct physical contact. While not entirely risk-free, meal delivery can provide welcome relief to people experiencing stressful lockdown conditions.
Similarly, the shares of Blue Apron – an online meal-kit delivery service – have surged more than 600% since the start of the outbreak.
In short, COVID-19 has caused a drastic shift towards contactless retail and food delivery services. It is an open question how much of this shift would have been possible without the pioneering business model innovations brought about by Amazon and its online retail platform, as well as modern food delivery platforms, such as UberEats and Deliveroo. At the very least, it seems unlikely that it would have happened as fast.
The entertainment industry is another area where increasing digitization has made lockdowns more bearable. The reason is obvious: locked-down consumers still require some form of amusement. With physical supply chains under tremendous strain, and social gatherings no longer an option, digital media has thus become the default choice for many.
Data published by Verizon shows a sharp increase (in the week running from March 9 to March 16) in the consumption of digital entertainment, especially gaming:
This echoes other sources, which also report that the use of traditional streaming platforms has surged in areas hit by COVID-19.
Netflix subscriptions are said to be spiking in locked-down communities. During the first week of March, Netflix installations increased by 77% in Italy and 33% in Spain, compared to the February average. Netflix app downloads increased by 33% in Hong kong and South Korea. The Amazon Prime app saw a similar increase.
Disney Plus has also been highly popular. According to one source, half of US homes with children under the age of 10 purchased a Disney Plus subscription. This trend is expected to continue during the COVID-19 outbreak. Disney even released Frozen II three months ahead of schedule in order to boost new subscriptions.
Hollywood studios have started releasing some of their lower-profile titles directly on streaming services.
Traffic has also increased significantly on popular gaming platforms.
According to the CEO of Verizon, gaming hours have gone up 75% since the start of COVID-19 lockdows, in early March.
Fortnite is also experiencing increased usage. In Italy, of example, game time is said to have increased by 70% since the beginning of the outbreak.
EA’s Call of Duty: Warzone achieved a record 15 million downloads in the first three days following its release. Its release likely led to the biggest peak in network usage, in the UK, since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.
These are just a tiny sample of the many ways in which digital entertainment is filling the void left by social gatherings. It is thus central to the lives of people under lockdown.
2. Cashless payments
But all of the services that are listed above rely on cashless payments – be it to limit the risk or contagion or because these transactions take place remotely. Fintech innovations have thus turned out to be one of the foundations that make social distancing policies viable.
This is particularly evident in the food industry.
Food delivery platforms, like UberEats and Deliveroo, already relied on mobile payments.
Costa coffee (a UK equivalent to starbucks) went cashless in an attempt to limit the spread of COVID-19.
Domino’s Pizza, among other franchises, announced that it would move to contactless deliveries.
President Donald Trump is said to have discussed plans to keep drive-thru restaurants open during the outbreak. This would also certainly imply exclusively digital payments.
And although doubts remain concerning the extent to which the SARS-CoV-2 virus may, or may not, be transmitted via banknotes and coins, many other businesses have preemptively ceased to accept cash payments.
As the Jodie Kelley – the CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association – put it, in a CNBC interview:
Contactless payments have come up as a new option for consumers who are much more conscious of what they touch.
This increased demand for cashless payments has been a blessing for Fintech firms.
Though it is too early to gage the magnitude of this shift, early signs – notably from China – suggest that mobile payments have become more common during the outbreak.
In China, Alipay announced that it expected to radically expand its services to new sectors – restaurants, cinema bookings, real estate purchases – in an attempt to compete with WeChat.
PayPal has also witnessed an uptick in transactions, though this growth might ultimately be weighed-down by declining economic activity.
In the past, Facebook had revealed plans to offer mobile payments across its platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram & Libra. Those plans may not have been politically viable at the time. The COVID-19 could conceivably change this.
In short, the COVID-19 outbreak has increased our reliance on digital payments, as these can both take place remotely and, potentially, limit contamination via banknotes. None of this would have been possible twenty years ago when industry pioneers, such as PayPal, were in their infancy.
3. High speed internet access
Similarly, it goes without saying that none of the above would be possible without the tremendous investments that have been made in broadband infrastructure, most notably by internet service providers. Though these companies have often faced strong criticism from the public, they provide the backbone upon which outbreak-stricken economies can function.
By causing so many activities to move online, the COVID-19 outbreak has put broadband networks to the test. So for, broadband infrastructure around the world has been up to the task. This is partly because the spike in usage has occurred in daytime hours (where network’s capacity is less straine), but also because ISPs traditionally rely on a number of tools to limit peak-time usage.
The biggest increases in usage seem to have occurred in daytime hours. As data from OpenVault illustrates:
Anecdotal data also suggests that, so far, fixed internet providers have not significantly struggled to handle this increased traffic (the same goes for Content Delivery Networks). Not only were these networks already designed to withstand high peaks in demand, but ISPs have, such as Verizon, increased their capacity to avoid potential issues.
For instance, internet speed tests performed using Ookla suggest that average download speeds only marginally decreased, it at all, in locked-down regions, compared to previous levels:
However, the same data suggests that mobile networks have faced slightly larger decreases in performance, though these do not appear to be severe. For instance, contrary to contemporaneous reports, a mobile network outage that occurred in the UK is unlikely to have been caused by a COVID-related surge.
The robustness exhibited by broadband networks is notably due to long-running efforts by ISPs (spurred by competition) to improve download speeds and latency. As one article put it:
For now, cable operators’ and telco providers’ networks are seemingly withstanding the increased demands, which is largely due to the upgrades that they’ve done over the past 10 or so years using technologies such as DOCSIS 3.1 or PON.
Pushed in part by Google Fiber’s launch back in 2012, the large cable operators and telcos, such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter Communications, have spent years upgrading their networks to 1-Gig speeds. Prior to those upgrades, cable operators in particular struggled with faster upload speeds, and the slowdown of broadband services during peak usage times, such as after school and in the evenings, as neighborhood nodes became overwhelmed.
This is not without policy ramifications.
For a start, these developments might vindicate antitrust enforcers that allowed mergers that led to higher investments, sometimes at the expense of slight reductions in price competition. This is notably the case for so-called 4 to 3 mergers in the wireless telecommunications industry. As an in-depth literature review by ICLE scholars concludes:
Studies of investment also found that markets with three facilities-based operators had significantly higher levels of investment by individual firms.
This may seem like a trivial problem, but it was totally avoidable. As a result of net neutrality regulation, European authorities and content providers have been forced into an awkward position (likely unfounded) that unnecessarily penalizes those consumers and ISPs who do not face congestion issues (conversely, it lets failing ISPs off the hook and disincentivizes further investments on their part). This is all the more unfortunate that, as argued above, streaming services are essential to locked-down consumers.
Critics may retort that small quality decreases hardly have any impact on consumers. But, if this is indeed the case, then content providers were using up unnecessary amounts of bandwidth before the COVID-19 outbreak (something that is less likely to occur without net neutrality obligations). And if not, then European consumers have indeed been deprived of something they valued. The shoe is thus on the other foot.
These normative considerations aside, the big point is that we can all be thankful to live in an era of high-speed internet.
4. Concluding remarks
Big Tech is rapidly emerging as one of the heroes of the COVID-19 crisis. Companies that were once on the receiving end of daily reproaches – by the press, enforcers, and scholars alike – are gaining renewed appreciation from the public. Times have changed since the early days of these companies – where consumers marvelled at the endless possibilities that their technologies offered. Today we are coming to realize how essential tech companies have become to our daily lives, and how they make society more resilient in the face of fat-tailed events, like pandemics.
The move to a contactless, digital, economy is a critical part of what makes contemporary societies better-equipped to deal with COVID-19. As this post has argued, online delivery, digital entertainment, contactless payments and high speed internet all play a critical role.
To think that we receive some of these services for free…
Last year, Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collins and Felix Eggers published a paper in PNAS, showing that consumers were willing to pay significant sums for online goods they currently receive free of charge. One can only imagine how much larger those sums would be if that same experiment were repeated today.
Even Big Tech’s critics are willing to recognize the huge debt we owe to these companies. As Stephen Levy wrote, in an article titled “Has the Coronavirus Killed the Techlash?”:
Who knew the techlash was susceptible to a virus?
The pandemic does not make any of the complaints about the tech giants less valid. They are still drivers of surveillance capitalism who duck their fair share of taxes and abuse their power in the marketplace. We in the press must still cover them aggressively and skeptically. And we still need a reckoning that protects the privacy of citizens, levels the competitive playing field, and holds these giants to account. But the momentum for that reckoning doesn’t seem sustainable at a moment when, to prop up our diminished lives, we are desperately dependent on what they’ve built. And glad that they built it.
While it is still early to draw policy lessons from the outbreak, one thing seems clear: the COVID-19 pandemic provides yet further evidence that tech policymakers should be extremely careful not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, by promoting regulations that may thwart innovation (or the opposite).
[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.
This post is authored by Dirk Auer, (Senior Fellow of Law & Economics, International Center for Law & Economics).]
Republican Senator Josh Hawley infamously argued that Big Tech is overrated. In his words:
My biggest critique of big tech is: what big innovation have they really given us? What is it now that in the last 15, 20 years that people who say they are the brightest minds in the country have given this country? What are their great innovations?
To Senator Hawley these questions seemed rhetorical. Big Tech’s innovations were trivial gadgets: “autoplay” and “snap streaks”, to quote him once more.
But, as any Monty Python connoisseur will tell you, rhetorical questions have a way of being … not so rhetorical. In one of Python’s most famous jokes, members of the “People’s Front of Judea” ask “what have the Romans ever done for us”? To their own surprise, the answer turns out to be a great deal:
This post is the first in a series examining some of the many ways in which Big Tech is making Coronavirus-related lockdowns and social distancing more bearable, and how Big Tech is enabling our economies to continue functioning (albeit at a severely reduced pace) throughout the outbreak.
Although Big Tech’s contributions are just a small part of a much wider battle, they suggest that the world is drastically better situated to deal with COVID-19 than it would have been twenty years ago – and this is in no small part thanks to Big Tech’s numerous innovations.
Of course, some will say that the world would be even better equipped to handle COVID-19, if Big Tech had only been subject to more (or less) regulation. Whether these critiques are correct, or not, they are not the point of this post. For many, like Senator Hawley, it is apparently undeniable that tech does more harm than good. But, as this post suggests, that is surely not the case. And before we do decide whether and how we want to regulate it in the future, we should be particularly mindful of what aspects of “Big Tech” seem particularly suited to dealing with the current crisis, and ensure that we don’t adopt regulations that thoughtlessly undermine these.
1. Priceless information
One of the most important ways in which Big Tech firms have supported international attempts to COVID-19 has been their role as information intermediaries.
When Facebook Is More Trustworthy Than the President: Social media companies are delivering reliable information in the coronavirus crisis.Why can’t they do that all the time?
The author is at least correct on the first part. Big Tech has become a cornucopia of reliable information about the virus:
Big Tech firms are partnering with the White House and other agencies to analyze massive COVID-19 datasets in order to help discover novel answers to questions about transmission, medical care, and other interventions. This partnership is possible thanks to the massive investments in AI infrastructure that the leading tech firms have made.
Google Scholar has partnered with renowned medical journals (as well as public authorities) to guide citizens towards cutting edge scholarship relating to COVID-19. This a transformative ressource in a world of lockdows and overburdened healthcare providers.
Google has added a number of features to its main search engine – such as a “Coronavirus Knowledge Panel” and SOS alerts – in order to help users deal with the spread of the virus.
On Twitter, information and insights about COVID-19 compete in the market for ideas. Numerous news outlets have published lists of recommended people to follow (Fortune, Forbes).
Furthermore – to curb some of the unwanted effects of an unrestrained market for ideas – Twitter (and most other digital platforms) links to the websites of public authorities when users search for COVID-related hashtags.
This flow of information is a two-way street: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, among others, enable citizens and experts to weigh in on the right policy approach to COVID-19.
Though the results are sometimes far from perfect, these exchanges may prove invaluable in critical times where usual methods of policy-making (such as hearings and conferences) are mostly off the table.
Perhaps most importantly, the Internet is a precious source of knowledge about how to deal with an emerging virus, as well as life under lockdown. We often take for granted how much of our lives benefit from extreme specialization. These exchanges are severely restricted under lockdown conditions. Luckily, with the internet and modern search engines (pioneered by Google), most of the world’s information is but a click away.
For example, Facebook Groups have been employed by users of the social media platform in order to better coordinate necessary activity among community members — like giving blood — while still engaging in social distancing.
In short, search engines and social networks have been beacons of information regarding COVID-19. Their mostly bottom-up approach to knowledge generation (i.e. popular topics emerge organically) is essential in a world of extreme uncertainty. This has ultimately enabled these players to stay ahead of the curve in bringing valuable information to citizens around the world.
2. Social interactions
This is probably the most obvious way in which Big Tech is making life under lockdown more bearable for everyone.
In Italy, Whatsapp messages and calls jumped by 20% following the outbreak of COVID-19. And Microsoft claims that the use of Skype jumped by 100%.
Younger users are turning to social networks, like TikTok, to deal with the harsh realities of the pandemic.
Strangers are using Facebook groups to support each other through difficult times.
And institutions, like the WHO, are piggybacking on this popularity to further raise awareness about COVID-19 via social media.
In South Africa, health authorities even created a whatsapp contact to answer users questions about the virus.
Most importantly, social media is a godsend for senior citizens and anyone else who may have to live in almost total isolation for the foreseeable future. For instance, nursing homes are putting communications apps, like Skype and WhatsApp, in the hands of their patients, to keep up their morale (here and here).
And with the economic effects of COVID-19 starting to gather speed, users will more than ever be grateful to receive these services free of charge. Sharing data – often very limited amounts – with a platform is an insignificant price to pay in times of economic hardship.
3. Working & Learning
It will also be impossible to effectively fight COVID-19 if we cannot maintain the economy afloat. Stock markets have already plunged by record amounts. Surely, these losses would be unfathomably worse if many of us were not lucky enough to be able to work, and from the safety of our own homes. And for those individuals who are unable to work from home, their own exposure is dramatically reduced thanks to a significant proportion of the population that can stay out of public.
Once again, we largely have Big Tech to thank for this.
Downloads of Microsoft Teams and Zoom are surging on both Google and Apple’s app stores. This is hardly surprising. With much of the workforce staying at home, these video-conference applications have become essential. The increased load generated by people working online might even have caused Microsoft Teams to crash in Europe.
According to Microsoft, the number of Microsoft Teams meetings increased by 500 percent in China.
Sensing that the current crisis may last for a while, some firms have also started to conduct job interviews online; populars apps for doing so include Skype, Zoom and Whatsapp.
Along similar lines, Google recently announced that its G suite of office applications – which enables users to share and work on documents online – had recently passed 2 Billion users.
Some tech firms (including Google, Microsoft and Zoom) have gone a step further and started giving away some of their enterprise productivity software, in order to help businesses move their workflows online.
And Big Tech is also helping universities, schools and parents to continue providing coursework and lectures to their students/children.
Zoom and Microsoft Teams have been popular choices for online learning. To facilitate the transition to online learning, Zoom has notably lifted time limits relating to the free version of its app (for schools in the most affected areas).
Even in the US, where the virus outbreak is currently smaller than in Europe, thousands of students are already being taught online.
Much of the online learning being conducted for primary school children is being done with affordable Chromebooks. And some of these Chromebooks are distributed to underserved schools through grant programs administered by Google.
Moreover, at the time of writing, most of the best selling books on Amazon.com are pre-school learning books:
Finally, the advent of online storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, has largely alleviated the need for physical copies of files. In turn, this enables employees to remotely access all the files they need to stay productive. While this may be convenient under normal circumstances, it becomes critical when retrieving a binder in the office is no longer an option.
4. So what has Big Tech ever done for us?
With millions of families around the world currently under forced lockdown, it is becoming increasingly evident that Big Tech’s innovations are anything but trivial. Innovations that seemed like convenient tools only a couple of days ago, are now becoming essential parts of our daily lives (or, at least, we are finally realizing how powerful they truly are).
The fight against COVID-19 will be hard. We can at least be thankful that we have Big Tech by our side. Paraphrasing the Monty Python crew:
Q: What has Big Tech ever done for us?
A: Abundant, free, and easily accessible information. Precious social interactions. Online working and learning.
Q: But apart from information, social interactions, and online working (and learning); what has Big Tech ever done for us?
For the answer to this question, I invite you to stay tuned for the next post in this series.
Yesterday was President Trump’s big “Social Media Summit” where he got together with a number of right-wing firebrands to decry the power of Big Tech to censor conservatives online. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Trump attacked social-media companies he says are trying to silence individuals and groups with right-leaning views, without presenting specific evidence. He said he was directing his administration to “explore all legislative and regulatory solutions to protect free speech and the free speech of all Americans.”
“Big Tech must not censor the voices of the American people,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of more than 100 allies who cheered him on. “This new technology is so important and it has to be used fairly.”
Despite the simplistic narrative tying President Trump’s vision of the world to conservatism, there is nothing conservative about his views on the First Amendment and how it applies to social media companies.
I have noted in severalplaces before that there is a conflict of visions when it comes to whether the First Amendment protects a negative or positive conception of free speech. For those unfamiliar with the distinction: it comes from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who identified negative liberty as freedom from external interference, and positive liberty as freedom to do something, including having the power and resources necessary to do that thing. Discussions of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech often elide over this distinction.
With respect to speech, the negative conception of liberty recognizes that individual property owners can control what is said on their property, for example. To force property owners to allow speakers/speech on their property that they don’t desire would actually be a violation of their liberty — what the Supreme Court calls “compelled speech.” The First Amendment, consistent with this view, generally protects speech from government interference (with very few, narrow exceptions), while allowing private regulation of speech (again, with very few, narrow exceptions).
Contrary to the original meaning of the First Amendment and the weight of Supreme Court precedent, President Trump’s view of the First Amendment is that it protects a positive conception of liberty — one under which the government, in order to facilitate its conception of “free speech,” has the right and even the duty to impose restrictions on how private actors regulate speech on their property (in this case, social media companies).
But if Trump’s view were adopted, discretion as to what is necessary to facilitate free speech would be left to future presidents and congresses, undermining the bedrock conservative principle of the Constitution as a shield against government regulation, all falsely in the name of protecting speech. This is counter to the general approach of modern conservatism (but not, of course, necessarily Republicanism) in the United States, including that of many of President Trump’s own judicial and agency appointees. Indeed, it is actually more consistent with the views of modern progressives — especially within the FCC.
For instance, the current conservative bloc on the Supreme Court (over the dissent of the four liberal Justices) recently reaffirmed the view that the First Amendment applies only to state action in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck. The opinion, written by Trump-appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, states plainly that:
Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment provides in relevant part that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment makes the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause applicable against the States: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .” §1. The text and original meaning of those Amendments, as well as this Court’s longstanding precedents, establish that the Free Speech Clause prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech. The Free Speech Clause does not prohibit private abridgment of speech… In accord with the text and structure of the Constitution, this Court’s state-action doctrine distinguishes the government from individuals and private entities. By enforcing that constitutional boundary between the governmental and the private, the state-action doctrine protects a robust sphere of individual liberty. (Emphasis added).
Former Stanford Law dean and First Amendment scholar, Kathleen Sullivan, has summed up the very different approaches to free speech pursued by conservatives and progressives (insofar as they are represented by the “conservative” and “liberal” blocs on the Supreme Court):
In the first vision…, free speech rights serve an overarching interest in political equality. Free speech as equality embraces first an antidiscrimination principle: in upholding the speech rights of anarchists, syndicalists, communists, civil rights marchers, Maoist flag burners, and other marginal, dissident, or unorthodox speakers, the Court protects members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference…. By invalidating conditions on speakers’ use of public land, facilities, and funds, a long line of speech cases in the free-speech-as-equality tradition ensures public subvention of speech expressing “the poorly financed causes of little people.” On the equality-based view of free speech, it follows that the well-financed causes of big people (or big corporations) do not merit special judicial protection from political regulation. And because, in this view, the value of equality is prior to the value of speech, politically disadvantaged speech prevails over regulation but regulation promoting political equality prevails over speech.
The second vision of free speech, by contrast, sees free speech as serving the interest of political liberty. On this view…, the First Amendment is a negative check on government tyranny, and treats with skepticism all government efforts at speech suppression that might skew the private ordering of ideas. And on this view, members of the public are trusted to make their own individual evaluations of speech, and government is forbidden to intervene for paternalistic or redistributive reasons. Government intervention might be warranted to correct certain allocative inefficiencies in the way that speech transactions take place, but otherwise, ideas are best left to a freely competitive ideological market.
The outcome of Citizens United is best explained as representing a triumph of the libertarian over the egalitarian vision of free speech. Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, articulates a robust vision of free speech as serving political liberty; the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, sets forth in depth the countervailing egalitarian view. (Emphasis added).
President Trump’s views on the regulation of private speech are alarmingly consistent with those embraced by the Court’s progressives to “protect[] members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference” — exactly the sort of conservative “victimhood” that Trump and his online supporters have somehow concocted to describe themselves.
The First Amendment does more than protect the interests of corporations. As courts have long recognized, it is a force to support individual interest in self-expression and the right of the public to receive information and ideas. As Justice Black so eloquently put it, “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” Our leased access rules provide opportunity for civic participation. They enhance the marketplace of ideas by increasing the number of speakers and the variety of viewpoints. They help preserve the possibility of a diverse, pluralistic medium—just as Congress called for the Cable Communications Policy Act… The proper inquiry then, is not simply whether corporations providing channel capacity have First Amendment rights, but whether this law abridges expression that the First Amendment was meant to protect. Here, our leased access rules are not content-based and their purpose and effect is to promote free speech. Moreover, they accomplish this in a narrowly-tailored way that does not substantially burden more speech than is necessary to further important interests. In other words, they are not at odds with the First Amendment, but instead help effectuate its purpose for all of us. (Emphasis added).
Consistent with the progressive approach, this leaves discretion in the hands of “experts” (like Rosenworcel) to determine what needs to be done in order to protect the underlying value of free speech in the First Amendment through government regulation, even if it means compelling speech upon private actors.
Trump’s view of what the First Amendment’s free speech protections entail when it comes to social media companies is inconsistent with the conception of the Constitution-as-guarantor-of-negative-liberty that conservatives have long embraced.
Of course, this is not merely a “conservative” position; it is fundamental to the longstanding bipartisan approach to free speech generally and to the regulation of online platforms specifically. As a diverse group of 75 scholars and civil society groups (including ICLE) wrote yesterday in their “Principles for Lawmakers on Liability for User-Generated Content Online”:
Principle #2: Any new intermediary liability law must not target constitutionally protected speech.
The government shouldn’t require—or coerce—intermediaries to remove constitutionally protected speech that the government cannot prohibit directly. Such demands violate the First Amendment. Also, imposing broad liability for user speech incentivizes services to err on the side of taking down speech, resulting in overbroad censorship—or even avoid offering speech forums altogether.
As those principles suggest, the sort of platform regulation that Trump, et al. advocate — essentially a “fairness doctrine” for the Internet — is the opposite of free speech:
Principle #4: Section 230 does not, and should not, require “neutrality.”
Publishing third-party content online never can be “neutral.” Indeed, every publication decision will necessarily prioritize some content at the expense of other content. Even an “objective” approach, such as presenting content in reverse chronological order, isn’t neutral because it prioritizes recency over other values. By protecting the prioritization, de-prioritization, and removal of content, Section 230 provides Internet services with the legal certainty they need to do the socially beneficial work of minimizing harmful content.
The idea that social media should be subject to a nondiscrimination requirement — for which President Trump and others like Senator Josh Hawley have been arguing lately — is flatly contrary to Section 230 — as well as to the First Amendment.
Conservatives upset about “social media discrimination” need to think hard about whether they really want to adopt this sort of position out of convenience, when the tradition with which they align rejects it — rightly — in nearly all other venues. Even if you believe that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are trying to make it harder for conservative voices to be heard (despite all evidence to the contrary), it is imprudent to reject constitutional first principles for a temporary policy victory. In fact, there’s nothing at all “conservative” about an abdication of the traditional principle linking freedom to property for the sake of political expediency.
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