When Facebook and its other services disappeared from the internet on Monday night, it seemed to confirm many people’s worst fears about the company. The outage, some said, demonstrated how indispensable Facebook had made itself to our lives – and hence, they argued, how important it was to regulate it or break it up.

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Mergers and acquisitions in tech have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. Some fear that Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook have been able to protect their market positions by acquiring smaller would-be competitors and stifling competition as a result.

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Executive Summary

The British government is consulting on whether to lower the burden of proof needed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block mergers and acquisitions involving large tech companies that have been deemed as having strategic market status (SMS) in some activity. This is likely to include companies like Google and Facebook, but the scope may grow over time.

Under the current regime, the CMA uses a two-step process. At Phase 1, the CMA assesses whether or not a deal has a ‘realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition’. If so, the merger is referred to Phase 2, where it is assessed in depth by an independent panel, and remedied or blocked if it is deemed to carry a greater than 50 per cent chance of substantially lessening competition.

The reforms proposed by the government would stop any deal involving a SMS firm that creates a ‘realistic prospect’ of reducing competition. This has been defined by courts as being a ‘greater than fanciful’ chance.

In practice, this could amount to a de facto ban on acquisitions by Big Tech firms in the UK, and any others designated as having strategic market status.

Mergers and acquisitions are normally good or neutral for competition, and there is little evidence that the bulk of SMS firms’ mergers have harmed competition.

Although the static benefits of mergers are widely acknowledged, the dynamic benefits are less well-understood. We highlight four key ways in which mergers and acquisitions can enhance competition by increasing dynamic efficiency:

Acquisition is a key route to exit for entrepreneurs

• Startup formation and venture capital investment is extremely sensitive to the availability of exits, the vast majority of which are through acquisition as opposed to listing on a stock market. In the US, more than half (58%) of startup founders expect to be acquired at some point.
• According to data provider Beauhurst, only nine equity-backed startups exited through IPO in 2019. By contrast, eight British equity-backed startups were acquired last year by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple alone.
• Cross-country studies find that restrictions on takeovers can have strong negative effects on VC activity. Countries that pass pro-takeover laws see a 40-50% growth in VC activity compared to others.
• Nine out of ten UK VCs believe that the ability to be acquired is ‘very important’ to the health of Britain’s startup ecosystem. Half of those surveyed said they would ‘significantly reduce’ the amount they invested if the ability to exit through M&A was restricted.

Acquisitions enable a ‘market for corporate control’

• M&A allows companies with specific skills, such as navigating regulatory processes or scaling products, to acquire startups and unlock value that would otherwise not be realised in the absence of a takeover.

Acquisitions can reduce transaction costs between complementary products

• M&A can encourage the development of complementary products that might not be able to find a market without the ability to be bought and integrated by an incumbent.
• In the presence of network effects or high switching costs, takeovers can be a way to allow incremental improvements to be developed and added to incumbent products that would not be sufficiently attractive to compete users away from the product by themselves.

Acquisitions can support inter-platform competition

• Competition in digital markets often takes place between digital platforms that have a strong position in one market and move into another market, sometimes using their advantage in the original market to gain a foothold in the new one. This often involves them moving into markets that are currently dominated by another digital platform, increasing competition faced by these companies.
• Acquisitions can accelerate this kind of inter-platform competition. Instead of starting from scratch, platforms can use mergers to gain a foothold in the new market, and do so more rapidly and perhaps more effectively than if they had to develop the product in-house.
• There are many examples of this kind of behaviour: Google’s acquisition of Android increased competition faced by Apple’s iPhone; Apple’s acquisition of Beats by Dre increased competition faced by Spotify; Walmart’s acquisition of Jet increased competition faced by Amazon in e-commerce; myriad acquisitions by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in cloud computing have strengthened the competition each of those face from each other.

The UK risks becoming a global outlier

• There is a serious risk that the US and EU do not follow suit on merger regulation. Although the EU’s Digital Markets Act is highly restrictive in some ways, it does not propose any changes to the EU’s standards of merger control besides changes to notification thresholds.
• It is also unlikely that the US will follow suit. Although a bill has been brought forward in Congress, it may struggle to pass without bipartisan support. In the last Congress, between 2019 and 2020, only 2% of the 16,601 pieces of legislation that were introduced were ultimately passed into law.

The Government’s theories of harm caused by tech mergers are under-evidenced, hard to action, and do not require a change in the burden of proof to be effectively incorporated into the CMA’s merger review process.

The Government should instead consider a more moderate approach that retains the balance of probabilities approach, but that attempts to drive competition by supporting startups and entrepreneurs, and gives the CMA the tools it needs to do the best job it can within the existing burden of proof.

• To support startups, the government should: streamline venture capital tax breaks such as EIS and SEIS, lift the EMI caps to £100M and 500 employees to make it easier for scale-ups to attract world-class talent, and implement reforms to the pensions charge cap to unlock more of the £1tn capital in Defined Contribution pension schemes for investment in startups.
• The CMA should be better equipped to challenge deals that are potentially anti-competitive with lower and mandatory notification thresholds for SMS firms, alongside additional resourcing to bring the cases it believes may threaten competition.
• Most importantly, any new SMS mergers regime should be limited to the activities given SMS designation, not the firms as a whole, to avoid limiting the use of M&A to increase inter-platform competition.

Read the full white paper here.

Congressional Republicans face a dilemma in determining how they want to approach Big Tech. Some perceive the largest tech companies to have too much power over political speech, power that can be used to censor conservatives. Many fear that so-called “woke” opinions are artificially promoted by tech companies whose employees agree with them, while news stories that contradict that narrative are downplayed.

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Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about the Western world. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well.

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Last week gave us a picture of things to come in Britain. First, the Government raised National Insurance contributions by 2.5%. This was ostensibly to pay for “social care”, but the money will mostly go to the NHS, with social care’s problems left largely unaddressed. Then, on Saturday, The Times reported that the Government will abandon many of its plans for planning reform, under pressure from Tory backbenchers and voters.

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The American Choice and Innovation Online Act (previously called the Platform Anti-Monopoly Act), introduced earlier this summer by U.S. Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), would significantly change the nature of digital platforms and, with them, the internet itself. Taken together, the bill’s provisions would turn platforms into passive intermediaries, undermining many of the features that make them valuable to consumers. This seems likely to remain the case even after potential revisions intended to minimize the bill’s unintended consequences.

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The government has opened a consultation on new plans to regulate Big Tech. But the proposals it is considering may end up hurting British startups and entrepreneurs unintentionally.

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Earlier this year, the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) hosted a conference with the Oxford Union on the themes of innovation, competition, and economic growth with some of our favorite scholars. Though attendance at the event itself was reserved for Oxford Union members, videos from that day are now available for everyone to watch.

Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan on demographics and growth

https://youtu.be/uB6txjzmEj0

Charles Goodhart, of Goodhart’s Law fame, and Manoj Pradhan discussed the relationship between demographics and growth, and argued that an aging global population could mean higher inflation and interest rates sooner than many imagine.

Catherine Tucker on privacy and innovation — is there a trade-off?

Catherine Tucker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discussed the costs and benefits of privacy regulation with ICLE’s Sam Bowman, and considered whether we face a trade-off between privacy and innovation online and in the fight against COVID-19.

Don Rosenberg on the political and economic challenges facing a global tech company in 2021

https://youtu.be/bP_Ca6SPLMM

Qualcomm’s General Counsel Don Rosenberg, formerly of Apple and IBM, discussed the political and economic challenges facing a global tech company in 2021, as well as dealing with China while working in one of the most strategically vital industries in the world.

David Teece on the dynamic capabilities framework

https://youtu.be/5jq5Vj3sjN0

David Teece explained the dynamic capabilities framework, a way of understanding business strategy and behavior in an uncertain world.

Vernon Smith in conversation with Shruti Rajagopalan on what we still have to learn from Adam Smith

https://youtu.be/3yyQWbndksQ

Nobel laureate Vernon Smith discussed the enduring insights of Adam Smith with the Mercatus Center’s Shruti Rajagopalan.

Samantha Hoffman, Robert Atkinson and Jennifer Huddleston on American and Chinese approaches to tech policy in the 2020s

https://youtu.be/6B4k4e8qzmc

The final panel, with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s President Robert Atkinson, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Samantha Hoffman, and the American Action Forum’s Jennifer Huddleston, discussed the role that tech policy in the U.S. and China plays in the geopolitics of the 2020s.