Lazar Radic on UK Tech Regulation
ICLE Senior Scholar Lazar Radic was quoted by Pirate Wires in a story about recent moves by the UK government toward more intense regulatory scrutiny of so-called “Big Tech” firms. You can read the full piece here.
“These regulations have been designed to short circuit competition laws in the sense that they institutionalize the enforcer’s preferred outcome,” says Lazar Radic, senior scholar for competition policy at the International Center for Law and Economics. That outcome might be that major platforms, like Apple and Google, should be open, not closed (one of the major stipulations by regulators acting under the DMA). Whatever the product decision might be, the underlying principle remains the same. As Radic puts it, “Here we have regulators saying, ‘We make the choice.’”
…“There’s a huge fear in Europe that the continent’s lagging behind is due in no small part to US companies buying European startups and unicorns,” Radic says. The idea is that as soon as a company becomes interesting, some Silicon Valley behemoth snaps it up before it can grow. After dozens of such acquisitions, the result (in this view, at least) is a stunted tech market.
…“This is a story about power — private versus public power, the state versus private enterprise,” Radic says. “Of course, it’s easier when the private companies happen to be American and you don’t have any of your own Big Tech companies that will be regulated.”
…“A lot of people are talking about how neoliberalism is over, and how the Washington Consensus failed,” says Radic. “As a result, a lot of this new regulatory movement is about subjecting private companies to the control of the state. This is a shift in political economy concerning the role of the state versus the role of the market and the permissible limits of state power.”