Texas AG Says Concerns About Ad Tech Monopoly Are Warranted
With the Google antitrust probe ongoing, there are reasons to be concerned about a monopoly in advertising tech and its harm to competition, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said Wednesday. Depriving rivals access to necessary data inputs is potentially anticompetitive, he said. “Competitors that hope to compete with Google in the online digital marketplace may not be able to do so if Google maintains a strategic bottleneck on access to critical user data,” he told the American Bar Association. He noted he wasn’t speaking directly about the ongoing Google probe (see 1909090060).
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A “strategic bottleneck” may violate antitrust law if a monopolist controls the data and fails to make it available to rivals, the AG said. Competition concerns arise when dominant platforms leverage their unique access to data and exclude access to entrants, he said, saying targeted ads by definition requires access to user data.
Data portability isn’t a panacea but allows consumers some control, said Paxton. “There needs to be more regulation.” Whether that means portability control or privacy controls, state and federal entities are becoming aware of tech companies having so much data and control over people’s lives.
The question is whether data collection affects competition, said Cornerstone Research Senior Vice President Vandy Howell. Forcing incumbents to share data might be anticompetitive because it reduces the incentive to innovate and create in the first place, she said. Sometimes from a distance, big seems bad and a lot of data under one roof seems scary, but under the hood, that mightn't hold up, she added.
Georgia Tech professor Peter Swire raised the issue of data portability, saying the practice increases competition by allowing platforms to compete with the likes of Facebook. It raises privacy concerns because it increases the amount of companies with access to data, he said.
Germany is amending its competition law because enforcers believe it doesn’t provide proper access to data, said competition chief Andreas Mundt. Privacy and competition are related, he said, noting general data protection regulation infringements found in the Facebook case, which is under appeal. Data isn’t necessarily the barrier to entry, but it can be, said Mundt: It depends on each case. The data that tech giants have is very special, he added, because it makes it extremely difficult for other companies to enter the market.