 All right, well, good afternoon, everyone. Okay, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. We're so glad to have you all here and welcome to another public knowledge webinar. We are very excited to be doing this special webinar on the topic of big tech and competition policy. As most folks know, there was a report that came out from the House Antitrust Subcommittee this week. It is big news in the tech policy world. My name is Chris Lewis, I'm the president CEO at Public Knowledge and glad to have you all joining us for this webinar to have a quick reaction, a quick analysis of the report, learn about it and talk about what it means for the technology space moving forward. The House Antitrust Committee conducted many, many hearings, more than 200 interviews with stakeholders all across the space about the impacts of the largest technology platforms. And the report from the majority is now available online as well as a report from minority members as well. But those are more than a year long bipartisan investigation by the House Antitrust Subcommittee. And so for the next hour, we're gonna talk about that report and we're very fortunate that to start things off for us is the chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee to join us and talk with us a bit level set for us, what's in the report and all the work that he's done up to this point with the committee. So please join me in welcoming Chairman David Sissalini from the House Antitrust Subcommittee. Chairman. Thank you, Chris. Before you start, I just wanna say, thank you so much to public knowledge, particularly Jean Kimmelman, Charlotte Slayman, Harold Feld and John Bergmayer. These individuals and public knowledge broadly provided real expertise and insight on antitrust law and regulation and provided tremendous contributions to the dialogue around competition and digital markets and really helped inform the important work of the subcommittee. So thank you so much for that. No, well, thank you Chairman. We love our staff and they really are doing tremendous analysis and we're so glad to see some of it cited in the report but maybe you can just start by helping our audience understand what the main takeaways were in the report that you came out with and we'll go from there. Sure, and I just wanna reinforce what you said at the very outset. This was an investigation which took about 16 months. It was fully bipartisan and it was really the first major antitrust investigation that Congress has conducted in over 50 years. So this was an important moment to really do a thorough analysis from top to bottom of the state of competition in the digital market. And as you mentioned, we heard from lots of witnesses held seven hearings, heard from 32 antitrust experts and lots of stakeholders. And I think what we found is that these four large platforms have monopoly power. They have dominant market power. They are using that market power to maintain their dominant positions to act as gatekeepers resulting in a significant decline in innovation, in consumer choice, in protections to consumer privacy. And they're using that market power to bully competitors, to crush or copy competitors, to acquire competitors. And as a result, there's very little competition in this space. And so the report then sets forth a roadmap really about how do we restore competition into the digital marketplace? But I think the findings of the report are important because they really produce evidence as to what is the state of these markets? Why does the absence of competition matter and then what Congress should do about it to correct it? Okay, now hopefully folks can find the link we certainly will be sending in our follow-up email to all our attendees, the resources, including the report itself. But Chairman, congratulations. I mean, first of all, I thought it was such an impressive undertaking over a year long in research and analysis. You mentioned all the hearings and certainly all the interviews. It's not something we often see these days in Congress, a lot of folks lament, what Congress is able to do, but when you have a dedicated team on a bipartisan basis, committed to investigating a sector just shows how much can be done. Where do you think Congress can go from here now that you've produced this extensive of a report? Yes, I just also want to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible staff of the Interest Subcommittee who did the work of three times the number of people that actually staffed this work. So I just want to salute and thank them. And part of the reason that we began this investigation and we really insisted that it be done in a bipartisan way was because it was pretty easy to see the problem, what the concentration of market power produced and what the absence of competition meant, but it was not immediately clear to all of us what the solutions were. And so this was really the process that we began understanding there were serious challenges that we needed to fully understand. And that's why so much of the report was about the state of digital competition in the digital marketplace. But it also was because we really didn't know the answers at the outset of this investigation or at least we hadn't settled on them. And so I think what we identified are kind of three main buckets of remedies to respond to these challenges. The first is restoring competition in the digital marketplace. And that is a whole range of ideas from structural separation. So you get rid of inherent conflicts of interest between people who sell goods and services and controllable market where they also have competitors for those goods and services present. You know, ensuring that in addition to that that we update and modernize our antitrust statutes so that they comport with the challenges in the digital economy. Most of our statutes were written at the turn of the century during the railroad and oil barons and it's a different economy. So we need to look at the antitrust statutes. Second, we wanna be sure that the NGOs agencies are staffed and have the resources they need to really do robust enforcement and be led by and staffed by people who are both creative and sufficiently aggressive and actually doing this work with the tools they currently have and with new tools that Congress will provide. And also ensuring that we look at the court decisions that have significantly narrowed antitrust enforcement. So a bunch of court decisions sort of spawn on a whole cloth that have really I think supplanted the intent of Congress to promote good competition policy with a set of antitrust statutes that have been narrowed so much so that very often antitrust enforces things. The burden here is too great. I'm not even going to bother. So I think Congress needs to correct that and make certain that the antitrust policy or good competition policy is clearly set forth by Congress and then the antitrust agencies have the resources and tools to actually enforce them. Okay. And so, you know, there's a long list of remedies you've laid out some. We also know and hear that there are antitrust investigations going on at the Department of Justice, at the FTC and with the state attorneys generals that will wait and see what comes out from those investigations. You know, how do you really get it? You've talked about the importance of both what Congress can do into your remedies, but you also have things that happen through the courts having stronger tools for the courts to look at antitrust. How do you view the possibility for working with whatever may come out of the agencies and do you have a role in that in Congress? So, you know, the agencies obviously are have enforcement responsibility and they have to make decisions about the conduct of an individual actor and a remedy in response to that behavior. We're not an enforcement body. So what we intended to do by way of this investigation is understand the digital marketplace broadly, look at the kind of underlying challenges and then set forth policy by way of legislation and regulation that will restore competition back to the digital markets. We're not an enforcement agency, but obviously we'll be informed by and we have been in the course of the investigation informed by the work of enforcement agencies here and around the world. But our focus will be on what are the things Congress can do when you think about restoring competition to the digital marketplace in addition to structural separation, things like data portability and interoperability, these sort of competition based solutions that will make it easier for people to compete and for people to move from one platform to another. So there are a number of legislative ideas that are set forth in this report or recommendations that will affect the marketplace broadly that won't relate to the specific enforcement of a company, but we'll continue to exchange information with the antitrust enforcers to be sure that we're informing our work with the most current business practices and behaviors of the market, but also we wanna be sure that they understand by the actions that we take, what our expectations are for robust antitrust enforcement. Okay, so it sounds like you do hope that in the next Congress that this report is not the end and it is the next step towards more specific reforms. Would you, is it fair to say that regulation will be on the agenda in the next Congress? Absolutely, this is just the beginning of our work to be very honest. I mean, this analysis and this report is the roadmap. Now we have to begin the difficult work of actually implementing the recommendations. I hope some of that will actually start in this Congress. I think you'll see some legislation introduced in the late days of this Congress, just to begin to educate our colleagues about the challenges ahead and the importance of it. And look, this is gonna be a battle. Writing report is easy, not easy. Writing report is one thing, getting the best ideas and the best thinking, but with tremendous economic power, often is followed by tremendous political power. And these companies have an enormous incentive to resist any change or to allow any competition into this market because they are benefiting enormously from the monopoly power and the market dominance they have. So they're gonna resist these changes like you've never seen before. And it's going to require a big effort to beat back the forces of these gigantic corporations who have all billions and billions and billions of reasons to want to keep everything exactly the way it is, which is hurting innovation, hurting consumers, degrading the quality of products and services and really impacting entrepreneurs. And frankly, our economy longterm. And so this is a battle, you know this, this battle between monopoly power, big corporate power and democracy has been raging since the founding of our country. This is the most recent form of it, but it's an important battle. Fantastic. Well, again, we're so glad you could make the time to join us. We have a reaction panel that we'll be talking about the report in detail next, but I just wanna thank you because of how important this work is, I think all of us in the public who watch policy discussions or hear the news reports about these investigations, we don't get a window into what the antitrust officials are really analyzing, but this hearing or this series of hearings, this year long investigation, I think is great for giving the public a real understanding of at least what's happening in the marketplace, and so that they can make informed decisions on what they want their elected officials to do, not just folks who are behind the scenes doing analysis of marketplace. So it's tremendously important we can't thank you enough chairman for your work. Thank you. And thank you again to public knowledge for all of your contributions. All right. Well, we'll let you go. We know you have a busy day. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. While the chairman clicks off, we're gonna switch over to our expert policy panel that will be working with us through the balance of the hour. And we wanna encourage folks who've joined us online if you're participating in the Zoom platform, you can put questions into the Q&A portion of Zoom. You can find Q&A at the bottom of your screen and please feel free to enter questions as I've seen one come in, but as we talk and go into more detail about what's in the report, we wanna try to address what you're interested in as we do this quick reaction to the report coming out. So I'll be looking there towards the end of the hour to put some questions towards our experts. Let me introduce who we have here with us. We are very fortunate to have, excuse me, four fantastic panelists. First from the public knowledge team introduced my colleague, Alex Petros as policy counsel here at public knowledge, working on antitrust and competition policy. Thank you, Alex, for all your work. But joining us, we also have a distinguished fellow from Georgetown Law Institute for Technology and Law Policy, founder of public knowledge, but now has gone on to do so many other amazing things Gigi's selling this with us. And we're also joined by the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Stacy Mitchell, as well as the president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, Jeffrey Manny. We're so glad to have all of you here. We wanted to have a group that may not agree on everything, but I could give some immediate reaction to the report. And so maybe we could go through with each of you and get your first cut reaction to the report. Did you see anything that surprised you after the year-long investigation and hearings? Are there things you would have liked to have seen in the report that's not there? What was your first gut reaction? And perhaps we can start with Gigi. Well, good afternoon, everybody. And Chris and Alex, thank you so much for letting me be on the panel. Can you hear me all right? Just wanna make sure. I have unmuted, all right, awesome. So before I give you my reaction, I just wanna congratulate Representative Cecilina, Chairman Cecilini and his amazing staff, Slade Bond, Lena Kahn, Phil Barabroyk, a former P.K.R. and Amanda Lewis for really what is a tour de force. You know, when I saw this document, my reaction was, wow, you know, it's big. The recommendations are bold. And despite what the press would like to report, it's bipartisan, right? I mean, there is general agreement among the Democrats and Republicans on this, on the committee, on the subcommittee that something needed to be done, an investigation needed to be done to look at the anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices of big tech, and that there are some reforms that need to happen in antitrust law and more supportive antitrust agencies. Obviously there was not complete agreement on everything and I know we'll talk about that later, but this was much more bipartisan. The press never wants to report on bipartisanship. They only wanna report on fighting, but it was more bipartisan and I think was given credit for. The amazing thing I thought about this was, this report brought the receipts, right? There are pages and pages and pages of evidence about conduct engaged in by these four companies to harm competitors, to use their gatekeeper status to cement their leadership in these markets. So, you know, this was not a bunch of talking points. This was like real evidence. It was something like 1.3 million documents or some insane number like that. So they really, really bought the receipts. And frankly, the recommendations were more comprehensive than I would have thought. So I guess that's a bit of a surprise. I didn't actually expect to see a recommendation that Congress overturned 10 Supreme Court precedent. And I also didn't expect to see as much in the way of what I would consider regulatory recommendations like data portability and interoperability and the like. You know, the regulatory recommendations are sort of an admission of sorts that antitrust law isn't enough. Jeff might even agree with me on this, not enough to constrain the behavior of some of these companies, the anti-competitive behavior. Now, the one thing I'd like to have seen in the report was a recommendation for a regulatory agency to oversee the digital platform market. And that is something that obviously public knowledge is very familiar with having, you know, a book by Harold Feld, my former colleague called the Digital Platform Act, which argues for this. And also another paper coming out of Harvard from my old boss, Tom Wheeler, Gene Kimmelman and Phil Bevere. I just think when you have an industry that is so large and so important to our economy and to consumers, to have them essentially unregulated for all intents and purposes, it's just not viable anymore. And I was, I did tell the chairman, Cecilini, I was a little disappointed not to see that, but that's the one thing I wish was in there that was not. Let's go to Stacy next and then we'll go to Jeffrey after that. Well, thank you. And good afternoon. It's so terrific to be here. And many thanks to public knowledge for putting this on and great to be invited to participate. I thought the report and the whole investigation was terrific. I think it's incredibly valuable to the American people and to Congress members as we think about how to grapple with this problem. And I was really, you know, we've had some really good investigative reporting that's been done on these companies, things that have been brought to light by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, you know, through their work. But seeing this committee work and seeing the report was really eye-opening to me in terms of what it is that why Congress is so important and why governmental investigations, how much deeper they go, their ability to actually get documents and so on and put the pieces together, you know, put the CEOs on the witness stand as it were, you know, is a really important function. And we haven't really seen these kinds of investigations certainly not of monopoly power in decades. So I think this was a huge undertaking and really a historic and incredibly valuable and important investigation. You know, I was struck in the report by a number of things. I was struck by the clarity of the language. You know, on the one hand it's a long report but it's actually very concise and accessible in many ways and puts the pieces together in a very coherent way and is not afraid to use terms like bullying, you know. There's a subsection that says bullying. And I think that that's really important because part of the challenge and opportunity of this moment is how do we engage the public in a conversation about what needs to happen next? And I think creating some clarity around exactly what some of these practices really mean in normal terms is really, really helpful. I appreciated that. I very much appreciated the quotes from small business owners at the hearing in July and that we're in the report. You know, I think again being able, it's really an extraordinary thing to be able to do something that is juicy reading for people in the antitrust field. And then also is something that very much brings us right down to the ground in terms of what are the impacts? How are people experiencing this? One, a couple of last things I would say on it is I was very much appreciated that the report put the responsibility squarely on Congress. You know, I mean, we can all imagine an alternate reality in which the antitrust laws were intact and the enforcement agencies were doing their jobs and you know, through these past decades, you know, in which case these companies would not be dominant the way that they are. We would have a more diverse ecosystem. So we can imagine that, but that's not what happened. And so now that we have this very entrenched and durable power, it is really Congress's job to figure out how do we structure, restructure these markets to make them competitive and open and fair? How do we do what we need to do to get the law and the enforcement back on track? And it's been so long that Congress has engaged in this issue that we sort of forget, but you know, in the past, Congress was stepping in periodically and doing these kinds of investigations and, you know, authoring new laws or clarifications to law. And you know, this committee did not shy away from really recognizing that this is Congress's job. Great. Jeff, we're glad to have you here because I know you don't always agree with us in public knowledge. We wanted to get a wide range of views. How'd you react to the report? Yeah, thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me and thanks to everyone at PK. Yeah, I obviously had a different reaction. I think it's interesting to me to hear the descriptions from folks about the sort of comprehensiveness of the report. I see it as being very much the opposite of that. I think there, one way to put it is the plural of anecdote isn't data, right, as the saying goes. There are a lot of anecdotes in the report about competitors or complimenters who purport to have been harmed by the platforms, but virtually no discussion of the sort of the benefits of the platforms themselves that they offer even to those very folks who are complaining, but also to their competitors. And it highlights a sort of truism that these markets are enormously complex. And for that reason, I think it's really hard to fault any investigation here. I mean, the effort, especially by those charged with regulating this kind of an industry or any industry to try to understand it better is certainly a good one. That doesn't mean though that the result of that is something that's inherently laudable. Here, for example, as I said, really complex markets. And you have an identifiable set of people who claim to have been harmed by the platforms. What's missing is an assessment of who might benefit from that very same conduct that might be harming the particular party who's complaining or even as I said, the parties themselves. So just to take one example, I think the sort of assumption that comes out of the report is that all these companies do are the kinds of things that harm people like the ones who are sort of cited in the report and complaining. But the reality is really far different. Take for example, Amazon has, what is it, some millions or sorry, hundreds of thousands of third party merchants who sell through the platform. I understand that as we saw in the report, some of them feel like they're not being treated fairly on the platform, but it's important to recognize that in the first instance, that platform wouldn't exist were it not for Amazon. Amazon's growth over the past 10 years or so has been borne mostly by expanding the revenues and sales of third party merchants rather than itself. Now, this isn't to say that there couldn't be problems on the margins, but it is important to note that they are on the margins. They are not, this is not a wholesale description of what happens in these businesses. So a related and probably even more significant problem as a result of that is the putting forward of recommendations. And then as we heard Chairman Sissolini say just a few minutes ago, the expectation that they will make efforts to implement those recommendations. I find it very concerning that there is certainly no effort in the report to try to assess the possible consequences of those recommendations. There's no effort to assess how well they might fit with the, even the harms that are alleged in the report, but certainly no effort to investigate or consider how they might impose unintended consequences that could be worse than the disease they're purporting to cure. So the idea that they're gonna go right from this to implementation is extremely worrying to me. This doesn't strike me as a comprehensive and rigorous sort of investigation. It's not really bipartisan, Gigi. It is true that I think it's important that to know that Congressman Bucks sort of, third party or minority report, which as far as I know only he signed on to, does echo a lot of the recommendations. It's not a deviation. And so I suppose if, I mean, it's not in very significant ways of deviation from what's in the report. And so, I mean, if that makes it bipartisan, one Republican Congressman who seems to largely support the report, but who didn't sign on to the actual report, then I mean, I guess superficially it's bipartisan. I think more importantly, this is a political document. This is not a objective sort of comprehensive investigation. And that's fine. It's coming out of Congress, which is a political body. I think though, we should just be careful talking about this report and the substance of this report because it is so much a political document. We may miss the real discussion, the real investigation and the real potential problems to be discussed if we focus too much on this report, which I think is a horribly lopsided view of things as opposed to even some of the other reports we've seen, even like the Foreman report out of the UK or even the Stigler Center report, also very critical of tech, but with a much more comprehensive sort of analysis. So we should be careful. People like me are gonna be very critical of the House report and even potentially dismissive of it because of its political nature. That doesn't mean there aren't real discussions that we should be having. I just don't think that the House report is going to engender them. Okay, interesting. And we've mentioned a lot of different reports here, the Stigler report, the Wheeler, Revere, Kimmelman, paper that Gigi mentioned, we'll try to package all of these into the follow-up email for everyone listening. But let me go to Alex for the last general reaction because we mentioned some details and we'll wanna dive into some of the examples of specific cases of companies from the report. But Alex, why don't you give us your final, your take on the report. Yes, thank you, Chris. So the feeling I had of reading the report, I last felt in December 2009, that's as a die-hard Kentucky basketball fan who had suffered through years of mediocrity. In 2009, we had a new coach and a new team and we beat North Carolina. This is the kind of game where we had spent years not living up to our potential and just getting blown out at. And I remember thinking Kentucky is back, baby, let's go. And that's pretty much exactly how I felt about Congress reading this report. Congress is back. Congress is back in its proper investigatory legislative role. They're back conducting over a years-long bipartisan investigation, going in-depth on a market with an in-depth investigation and then offering legislative solutions to the problems found. Is it, we can talk through a shortcoming, but I definitely think it's a step in the right direction. With along with GEG, Pek is always gonna be like digital regulator, digital regulator, that would have been wonderful to see in there. But overall, I think it's a really great report that moves us in the right direction that doing nothing here and kind of what Congress has been doing of just not really understanding tech markets, just kind of treading water. I think that those days are over and there is some degree of bipartisanship here. There is some degree of forward momentum. And that's thanks to the chairman and his great staff here. Just to respond to Jeff a bit, I think he does bring up some interesting points. These markets are incredibly complex and you've seen Congress in the past, like that complexity, they've just kind of shyed away from but what I like about this report is they really kind of take that complexity head on. And when you look at the Buc report, it's not just signed on by Ken Buc, you have Matt Gates signing on, Andy Biggs, Doug Collins, like these are people who are not exactly the most bipartisan members of Congress, but they see a problem with tech and they're willing to confront it. I definitely think there is at least some common ground we can find and move forward. Okay, thanks, Alex. I know a particular staffer who's gonna yell at me about all the Kentucky basketball comments that you made, but we'll muddle through. Chris, can I just also, if I hate to tag team against Jeff, but the complexity argument really made my antenna rise because if that's gonna be an excuse not to strengthen any trust law, and I think it is, then you never, you're basically never gonna enforce any trust law. I mean, I'm still hurting because a federal judge in New York said that the provision of mobile telephone service was so complex that he couldn't find that the horizontal merger between Sprint and T-Mobile was anti-competitive. Oh, it's so complex, there's antennas and phones and oh my God, I mean, you can create complexity in every single market and that means that antitrust never applies. So I just think that is not a good reason. I think it's a good reason to restore the Office of Technology Assessment in Congress and to teach judges how technology works, which my home base, Georgetown is doing. It's certainly not a reason to say, well, we have got to throw antitrust and regulation out of the window because it's too complicated. I don't agree with Jeff that the report doesn't say that there are any benefits. In fact, I think it acknowledges for each company that they do bring benefits to the economy, but that for now, this is outweighed by the concerns over anti-competitive and anti-consumer conduct. I also think, look, you're not gonna go from this report to legislation being passed, let's be real. And the chairman said, this is the beginning, this is not the end. Legislature will be introduced, there will be hearings, there will be discussions. So this really is the very, very beginning. So it's not gonna be just a rush to legislation, although it is true, this is gonna be a marker for the Democrats. And finally, I think it's really important, I don't know if people read and maybe somebody can post in the chat David Diane's piece in the American Prospect because what that piece said was that this report is not really about big tech. It's about consolidation across the board, right? In pharma, in healthcare, in airlines, industries you just love to hate, right? In broadband and cable, right? This is, and big tech really here is just an example. So this is really about broader anti-trust reforms and as Alex I think said very, very articulately and Stacey said as well, this is about Congress reasserting itself as the preeminent voice on anti-trust issues. For 40 years, Congress has let the courts weaken anti-trust law and has let lacks of anti-trust enforcement weaken anti-trust law. And Chairman Cicillini and his colleagues, including Republican colleagues are saying, no moss, okay? Congress wrote the anti-trust laws and Congress is gonna fix and revitalize the anti-trust laws. Okay, well, maybe we dive in, excuse me, to some of the, we'll try to get a couple at least of the specific examples of the big tech companies that were in the report and hopefully that will help with some of the questions we're getting to but we are getting great questions so keep them coming folks. And maybe I can start with Stacey and then there was a question around Amazon pointed at Jeff as well. Stacey, maybe you've done so much work in analyzing Amazon and they were certainly highlighted in the report quite a bit. Can you talk a bit about the dynamics of that company and what you see in the report that you thought was strong and what do you think about the recommendations and how they might apply to that specific case? Yeah, absolutely. And there's a lot packed in there so I'll try to pull out a few highlights. You know, I think one thing that was quite interesting about the report with regard to Amazon is that the news accounts, the existing information have been that Amazon's market share in online commerce was about 37, 38%. The report says it's actually closer to 50% and based on the documents that they reviewed from Amazon. So that's an important finding and in effect between that 50% market share of online shopping and an even larger share of initial search. So where people go, where they land when they wanna look for a product online, it's about two thirds of Americans just simply start on Amazon. So that means if you're not selling on Amazon, if you make or retail any product, you're really giving up a huge portion of the market right out of the gate. And so the report concludes that Amazon really has monopoly power, durable monopoly power over the small and mid-sized businesses that are sellers on its platform and goes through a number of ways in which it exploits that power to undermine them and work to its own advantage. It reveals that Amazon, while it refers externally to third party sellers as quote partners, that internally it refers to them as quote internal competitors. So an illusion to the fact that Amazon hosts the rails by which these companies rely on to get to market and also competes directly with them on those same rails. There's a lot of detail about the ways in which Amazon self-preferences and self-deals in that position, how it uses proprietary data to advantage its own interests. And there's a detailed discussion about tying the fact that Amazon has built a huge shipping and package delivery operation, one that now is on track to be larger than UPS and FedEx in the next couple of years, according to analysts, by basically compelling third party sellers to use its warehouse and shipping services in order to have the visibility on the platform that enables sales. And so it is essentially not competing on the merits, but rather using its dominance over sellers. Similarly, is a building a huge advertising business in the same kind of way. I think to talk specifically about some of the things that Jeff said about third party sellers, it's important to note that the vast majority of third party sellers crash and burn. This is not a successful strategy. And there's actually quite a bit of data to back this up that what has happened is that there's growing numbers of sellers based overseas. And then in reality, Amazon's third party strategy is sort of about outsourcing its supply chain in a different kind of a way. And lots of small and mid-sized businesses are not actually successful at all. They're on the platform for a short period of time because they feel like they have to because that's where people are. But it proves to be a money losing venture at best. And there's just sort of an endless stream of desperate people willing to try and then an endless global universe of people willing to try. And so there is constantly being fed into the Amazon machine. We did a report early in the summer called Amazon's toll booth about its growing fees that it extracts from sellers. And one of the very interesting pieces of evidence that the investigation uncovered is internal documents from Amazon where they're essentially talking about how they had had these big fee increases in 2018 and had essentially lost no sellers as a result. So basically saying, what we can raise prices as much as we want and it's not gonna matter to who's on there. There was a lot more, I think a lot more predatory pricing and so on. A couple last things I'll say about the findings around Amazon, you really get this picture of a company that leverages power in one area to move into adjacent markets with a built-in advantage and that can keep doing that sort of endlessly on and on. And I think that that is a very serious problem for the future of competition. And the report in particular looks at sort of the emerging world of voice which I think is a sort of critical future for how people are gonna interact not only with their appliances and their washing machines but also with the web and Amazon has positioned itself as the key intermediary in that emerging market. And I think the report was very strong on recommendations. I think structural separation, non-discrimination, resurrecting predatory pricing and making the agencies more public facing were some of the things that stood out to me and I've been talking for a while so I won't go into why I think those are important but I'm happy to continue down that road as the conversation goes forward. Okay, thank you Stacey. And Jeff, I had mentioned you, I didn't know if you would wanna follow up on Amazon specifically but there was a question in the Q and A that gave, you mentioned anecdotes versus data and someone who's watching has their own anecdote about having experienced the difficulty of selling books on Amazon because of the sorts of fees that the seller that Stacey was talking about. So I don't know if you wanna weigh in there or we can move on if you have an Amazon specific thought. Yeah. Well, I'd love to. I wanna make one quick comment about in response to Gigi just to say, I agree, I don't think complexity is a reason not to regulate or have any trust. That's not what I was saying. What I was saying is that complexity does mean that it's hard to figure out exactly how to do that and promote social welfare and not cause more harm than what you're solving. And I don't think the report came nearly close to trying to assess that. That doesn't mean it can't be done or shouldn't be done or regulation shouldn't happen. It just means that it is a difficulty that the report sidestepped. With respect to Amazon, I think, first of all, as the anecdote that you mentioned, Chris sort of demonstrates, the vast majority of the complaints here are to me, commercial disputes. These are the kinds of disputes that businesses have all the time. They would each like to earn more. They would each like to take some share of profit, some share of business, whatever it is from their competitors or even their partners. And I don't really see much difference between a typical commercial dispute and saying, as you mentioned, the questioner said that it's hard to sell books when Amazon takes 30%. It's in Amazon's interest, clearly, for reasons that Stacey even suggested. Amazon is an intermediary that profits off of providing intermediary functions. It's in Amazon's interest to make sure that all of the third parties can succeed on the platform and want to be there. That's how it makes its revenue. So if 30% is too high for too many sellers, then I suspect they would lower that rate. If it's not too high, because many sellers are perfectly able to compete at that level, then it's true, some will go out of business. But the fact that some competitors or some companies go out of business does not mean that a market is flawed or failing. The point about the third party sellers on the platform failing strikes me as, I mean, I would say, yeah, of course, most startups are unsuccessful. Retail is an incredibly narrow margin business. Of course they fail. It's, again, not Amazon's sort of obligation or even its intention to somehow overcome every single transaction cost and every single impediment to a successful business in the world and provide that opportunity. It overcomes a lot of them, though. I'm quite confident that the services that Amazon provides, the ability to access a global marketplace rather than just your local customers, the logistic services that it provides, all of these things that, by the way, people complain about because they don't want to pay for them, all of those things facilitate these companies not failing. And it doesn't mean every company will succeed. And of course, a lot more goes into succeeding than having some reduction in prices. And then finally, to the point about intermediaries, again, Amazon is an intermediary and they do make their revenue from providing intermediary services. But we shouldn't sort of trash intermediaries. Let's not forget that all of the retailers selling on Amazon are intermediaries. If, you know, that doesn't mean that everything an intermediary does is socially valuable. And for example, that's one reason why a lot of retailers on Amazon going out of business doesn't strike me as a big concern because there are a near infinite number of other retailers selling the exact same products. It's hard to know why the loss of some of them is a social welfare problem. I understand why it's a problem for the ones who lose out. But the fact that those entities and Amazon itself provide valuable intermediary services for which they get compensated, that's a positive. That's a feature, not a bug. We can debate whether there's, again, sort of in the nature of a commercial dispute whether Amazon is somehow able to take marginally more than a sort of theoretical competitive level. But the report certainly doesn't do that. Doesn't even make an effort to try to establish what a sort of competitive price would be and exactly by what margin Amazon, these competitors, I'm sorry, these complainants and or the report think that Amazon is exceeding that. So I think it's really important again to bear in mind all that Amazon and these other platforms do convey, do provide for sellers how it's in their very interest to do so and that we shouldn't make the few complaints sort of subsume the overarching characterization. Yeah, so let me, before we take another example of one of the companies, the first question we got and I think of this one when I hear you talking, Jeff, and I know you're outnumbered here. So, but it actually asks a very simple question of how are you defining monopoly here? And we have the anecdotes, but we also have a lot of information in the report that talks about the power, the gatekeeper power that these different platforms have. So it's, when we're talking about monopoly or we're talking about the dominance of a platform, we're talking about multiple companies or we're talking about how they can impact a market in their own specific way because of the nature of the digital marketplace. I wonder if maybe Alex and Stacy, you could talk a bit about, when we're talking about monopoly, how are these companies different than maybe monopolies we've seen in the past? Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to start that one off. Like you're really like looking at what we call bottleneck power, gatekeeper power. Like it's important to know like these companies are powerful in their own right whether you're just looking at a traditional market-level analysis, but it's like where they're placed kind of in the, in the internet kind of chain of things. So think of how so many of your internet browsing sessions start with a Google search and that at the very start of that browsing session you're starting off with Google kind of pointing you in the right direction. Like Google gets an immense amount of power from being at that strategic spot. And I think it's something that traditional anti-trust law can sometimes struggle to reach that like the strategic because as the chairman talked about at the beginning or anti-trust laws or written to fight back against railroad barons, oil barons. They weren't made for something like the internet. They weren't made for a platform whose currency is data and a non-rival risk good that has incredibly increasing returns to scope and scale. And I think when you look at that, like that's why I was so happy to see the report go beyond anti-trust law to regulatory reforms and things like interoperability, data portability, a self-preferencing rule. Things we at P.K. and my amazing colleagues talk up all the time as really something that can be very helpful in these sorts of markets. Gigi or Stacey, I don't know if it is. Stacey, go ahead, Stacey. And then I wouldn't mind saying something as well. Go ahead. Oh, sure. Yeah, I think that's right. I think these are companies that serve as infrastructure, essential infrastructure for lots of other companies and often directly compete with those companies at the same time and that's an inherent conflict of interest. So this notion of the gatekeeper power is profound, the ability of Amazon to decide suddenly that businesses that had been selling certain products on the site are gonna have their accounts canceled or gonna be blocked from actually selling those products because Amazon has decided to sell them itself. In a world where we had lots of platforms, that would be no problem because those businesses could say, well, I'm doing sales on other platforms, I'll focus there. But in a world where you capture so much of the audience share right out of the gate, that's not an option. Sellers really don't have other places to go. And when you begin to combine the platform through which so much of commerce is done with the cloud, with the voice interface, what you begin to see is that you've got a company that has a kind of godlike view of a lot of the activity across the economy and an ability to exploit information about what its competitors are up to to move into markets with an advantage that no one else has. Everybody else is in the dark. That is a kind of durable power. And I think the definition of monopoly really is, are you in a position where you can dictate terms to others? And in the case of these companies, we see that over and over and over again. Before I give you my definition of monopoly power, I also wanna remind you, Chris, that again, it's not just anecdotes in this document. It's actually the words of the people working in these firms that dam them, right? So like the economists at Facebook who said, yeah, we're tipping towards monopoly and I'm worried that our own product, Instagram is competing with us. And there's instances in each one of these companies of internal emails, internal documents, and admissions from former employees that yeah, yeah, we were trying to crush the competition and we made no bones about it. So I just wanna say that it goes beyond the angry ditch seller or something like that to people actually inside the company saying, this is what we were trying to do. It's really quite remarkable. Let me- The tremendous trove of emails and resources that folks can find on the House and I Trust Committee website. So yeah, definitely. Yeah, it's amazing when people put in emails, right? This is like remarkable, like, oh my God. So let me try to give you a definition of monopoly power. Lack of substitutes, high entry and exit barriers, and super normal profits over a long period of time. I mean, please tell me that there is a substitute for Facebook for social networking or Google for search, right? I mean, it's all those three things together, but I mean, it's very, very hard to argue that the companies that were looked at in this report don't satisfy those four things. So that's my definition. And I think it's a pretty neat fit for the tech companies. But again, at the risk of saying this over and over, and I'm sure you'll ask me a question, this is not just about the big tech industry, it's about consolidation across the board. Great. We are, wow, running way over time. An hour is just not enough and that just shows how this is not the end of the conversation, it's the beginning of the conversation. Maybe really quickly in the last five minutes we could do a couple of things. One, I was hoping maybe Jeff and Alex or maybe just Jeff, you could give your take on what was found in the report about Google, just to give another example of what we're seeing from different companies. And then Gigi, I wanna come back to you. Sure, I think the report mainly focused on Google search, the issues that interestingly are slated to be raised by the DOJ any day now in its complaint. Which I think, by the way, is important. The claims that there's no enforcement and even no enforcement against these companies seems a little bit premature given the enforcement actions that we know are on the horizon. But the search complaints were kind of a variant of the same complaints that the European Commission dealt with in the Google shopping case. And similar to what happened in Europe in the Google shopping case, I think it's really telling that there's no evidence of consumer harm in the kinds of criticisms that are brought in this report against Google search. I'm sorry, I should make clear for people that the alleged problem here is Google self-preferencing itself, putting its own results at the top of a search result page when at some point in the past, it might have instead sent a link to some other site, a competing vertical search provider or something. It's not at all clear why consumers would be harmed by this. It is clear why some particular vertical search providers who were previously dependent on traffic from Google, who might have seen their traffic go down. That's what the European Commission found, reduction in traffic. It's clear why they would have a complaint. It's not clear why that translates into problems for consumers. And that really gets into this whole problem of the complexity here that by looking at just one part of these really complex multi-sided markets, you miss the effects elsewhere in the market, which can, I'm not saying they always do, but they can actually be more substantial in the opposite direction, let's say more beneficial than the cost you might be able to identify to the competing vertical search providers, for example. I don't think that's assessed in the report. And for what it's worth, it's not even assessed in the European Commission's Google Shopping case. Okay, we'll run a little bit over before we go to you, Gigi. Alex, thoughts on? Yeah, no, I mean, I would push back a little bit there. I thought the report did actually go into some harms from Google search that I thought were really good. And in that, there is a great graphic in the report that it shows over time, like Google search has more and more ads in it and the ads get less and less noticeable that they're actually ads and not organic search results. And this kind of comes from the fact that like Google in search is not, especially in horizontal search, isn't facing that much if any competitive pressure. So you're seeing a lack of innovation for the consumer. You're seeing, there's really, Google at least as a company, I don't think there is an incentive for them to put forward the very best product that they possibly can because they know at the end of the day, if you're looking for a horizontal search provider, there's not a lot of, there won't be a lot of movement, whether that be through Google's default placement, Google's domination of mobile search, like they've really done a good job of like making it hard to leave the Google ecosystem. And I would argue that is in fact bad for consumers. Chris, can I make one really small quick response to that? Really fast, because we're out of time here, Josh. I just wanna flag, Alex, you make a good point about the appearance of more ads, let's say, on Google search. I just wanna make clear again, handling this complexity, what do you think you get when you go to one of the sort of vertical search engines that's allegedly losing traffic that is staying on the Google site? Well, you get ads and you may not even get as good ads or you may get paid placements and various aspects of the product that's being offered that are not very good for consumers. I mean, the internet is ad funded. That's the reality. It's not at all clear that Google has an incentive to sort of over inundate consumers with ads, especially relative to small sites that are sort of just trying to grab any amount of revenue they can from traffic past to them from leaving. And we haven't even, there isn't even enough time to get into the studies that talk about the dominance of Google in the ad market and how that relates to what we're talking about here. So just so much more to work on. Gigi, I'm gonna let you have the last word here. There's like three different questions I wanna ask you. There was a great one from an audience member about why can't existing antitrust regulators do the job of regulating digital platforms. But I know you have thoughts also on just, what this report means for similar work across competition concerns outside of digital platforms. Yeah, so actually, let me ask Jeff Hart, ask that question, well, first of all, obviously when you have weak antitrust laws, it doesn't even matter in some cases, how much, how many resources an FTC or DOJ has. So you were gonna ask a question, how should we prioritize? Or somebody asked the question in the chat. It's like, it's very hard to prioritize. I prioritize strengthening the law and then strengthening the agencies that enforce that law. Look, the thing about regulatory agencies is that rules moderate bad behavior in first place and they let consumers know what their rights are. An enforcement agency like the FTC, like the DOJ, they can't take every single case or complaint, right? They have to be extremely, even if they have more resources, they have to be very, very selective. Antitrust cases take forever. Like if you're a Jeff Hart and you wanna get, and you feel like you've been wrongly kicked off of Amazon, you're gonna bring in antitrust case number one, and obviously the report recommends fixing this, there are barriers to actually going to the courthouse. But number two, do you have two or three years till an antitrust case wins its way through the court? So the thing about regulatory agencies is they actually, believe it or not, can act quickly and they certainly can act more quickly than the courts. And yes, I see a lot of things here that could be applied in other areas. So obviously my expertise, as you know, is sort of broadband and telecom and media. So I'm looking at things like prohibitions against operating in adjacent lines of businesses, non-discrimination, obviously, it's borrowed from net neutrality, prohibitions against self-preferencing, presumptions against future mergers, strengthening protections against predatory pricing, and obviously the strengthening of the Clayton Act and the Sherman Act, eliminating forced arbitration clauses. So those are some, just some of the recommendations that really it doesn't matter, almost doesn't matter what industry you're talking about, if they're horizontally and vertically consolidated, these would apply. Okay. Great examples. So much to sink our teeth into with this report. So, first of all, let me thank our awesome panel. We could have gone on for another hour or so, but I appreciate you guys taking the time to be here with us. I wanna thank Chairman Ciccellini for taking the time to join us. And really we've been putting some of the links in the chat, whether it's Stacey's Amazon Monopoly toll booth work or others, we're gonna send out an extensive list to everyone who's participated, an extensive list of links and reports, stuff that our panelists give us to look at, because this is an ongoing conversation. This report is not the beginning, excuse me, not the end, it is the beginning. And personally, I look forward to seeing what we can do with these recommendations. And the ongoing conversation that we can have since there really seem to be a lot of agreement on the subcommittee about how the marketplace is structured here. And so our hope is that we can continue to have these sorts of conversations. Thank you all for joining us. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We keep these all on YouTube. 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