Sam Bowman on Antitrust Legislation

Reason – ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman was quoted by Reason in a story about major antitrust legislation passed by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. You can read the full piece here.

The bills “ignore the procompetitive effects of digital platforms extending into each other’s markets and competing with each other there, in ways that often lead to far more intense competition—and better outcomes for consumers—than if the only firms that could compete with the incumbent platform were small startups,” notes Sam Bowman, director of competition policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research center based in Portland, Oregon.

Many of the proposals also seek “to make digital platforms into narrow conduits for other firms to operate on, ignoring the value created by platforms curating their own services by, for example, creating quality controls on entry (as Apple does on its App Store) or by integrating their services with related products (like, say, Google adding events from Gmail to users’ Google Calendars),” Bowman writes.