✪ Fan Peng | Institute of Political Science, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
✪ Lee Yeon | Department of Politics and Administration, Chinese University, Hong Kong
On April 10, Alibaba Group's investigation under the Anti-Monopoly Law last year finally came to an end. In response to Alibaba Group's abuse of its dominant market position in china's online retail platform service market, the State Administration for Market Regulation imposed an administrative penalty on him, ordered him to stop the illegal acts, and fined him 4% of its sales in China in 2019, totaling 18.228 billion yuan.
Following the Internet anti-monopoly storm at the end of last year, platform anti-monopoly has become the focus of social attention. The authors of this article point out that the biggest difficulty of platform antitrust is not the scale and structure of technology giants, but their technical characteristics and the process characteristics of power exercise. These characteristics make the giants with administrative capacity over traditional government organizations and state borders, becoming a phenomenon-level political species that "looks like a state." In this regard, platform monopoly is not just an economic issue, but has become a world-class political phenomenon. At the same time, the rise of giants has also brought about "creative destruction" problems such as invasion of privacy and intensification of social differentiation, and giants who have started with innovation will use their dominant positions to hinder small and medium-sized enterprises from entering the market, which in turn curbs innovation. What is more important to note is that in some countries, there has been a trend of Internet giants influencing policies through "revolving doors", and the ability of countries to act seems to be greatly hindered.
The authors argue that the state's vigilance and intervention in the monopoly position of platform giants and their possible secondary disasters are instinctive reactions of the political and organizational systems, but state power may not be fully prepared in terms of anti-monopoly theoretical strategies, technical means, and resource reserves. The deep game of these two forces is worth observing continuously.
This article was published in the First Issue (February) issue of Culture Magazine in 2021, and is hereby compiled and distributed for your consideration.
Taming Tech Giants: The National Logic of Antitrust Action
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" >▍ anti-tech giant monopoly state action</h1>
In late 2020, China's market regulators launched an investigation into the suspected monopolistic behavior of technology company Alibaba Group, an important measure taken by the Chinese government to actively promote antitrust and prevent the disorderly expansion of capital. There is an important global background behind this event, as the "big tech" has gradually developed into an important market player in the past two years, governments around the world are paying close attention to the broad and profound impact of technology giants, and national actions characterized by strong regulation and antitrust continue.
In October 2019, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released an investigation into the tech giants, concluding that four tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google — have transformed from "challenging startups" to "super monopolists like oil tycoons and railroad tycoons we've seen throughout history."
A year later, on October 9, 2020, the antitrust panel of the U.S. House judiciary completed a 16-month investigation into the four giants, a 449-page report detailing the past 16 months of U.S. government monopoly investigations into Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. The report denounces these tech giants for having strong "monopolies" in key business areas and for abusing their market dominance. The report provides plenty of evidence that tech giants' anti-competitive behavior hinders innovation, reduces consumer choice, and even weakens the foundations of democracy. Following the Justice Department, on December 9, 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, together with 48 states, sued Facebook for its illegal monopoly in the social networking space after an extensive investigation, an action aimed at forcing the company to spin off its two main business units, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In Europe, as early as 2018, the European Union issued the General Data Protection Regulation, which imposed penalties on apple, Facebook and Google at that time for data monopolies and illegal tax evasion. On December 15, 2020, the European Union released two newly draft laws on digital services act and digital markets act, which some commented that these two bills will most likely lead to a comprehensive regulatory body to better regulate technology giants from Silicon Valley. Following the EUROPEAN Union, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a statement in late December 2020 saying that the UK government was proposing regulatory measures against technology giants to strengthen local technology regulation and online social protection.
Some commentators believe that these national actions against technology giants show that the understanding of the market environment for new technologies by policymakers in various countries is undergoing "evolution", and regulatory policies in the field of new technologies will also undergo a significant shift. In December 2020, The New York Times organized a symposium in Washington that invited lawmakers and experts in the fields of technology and policy to discuss the tech giants, and among the many consensus they reached, the most basic judgment was that "the era of self-regulation (of technology companies) is over and requires state action."
Paradoxically, however, when governments are engaged in antitrust action, the response from the financial markets and technology companies has been indifferent. The market capitalization of the five technology giants in Silicon Valley in the United States increased by 46% for the whole of 2020, with a total share price of $7.2 trillion. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has further enhanced the economic capabilities of multinational technology giants around the world.
The strong contrast between the government's fiery anti-monopoly action and the cold reaction of the market society can be described as "ice and fire". Traditional state organizations have shown a strong willingness to strengthen supervision of emerging technology giants, and governments have tried to "tame" technology giants by writing regulatory guidelines for specific technology products, issuing huge fines, initiating legislative regulations, or even forcibly splitting up, declaring the will to defend state power. But the process has also exposed the dilemmas countries face in strengthening the regulation and antitrust of tech giants. There is a lot of evidence that traditional countries have serious system lags and relative lack of capacity on the issue of anti-technology giants.
It has long been pointed out that the new technological revolution has the potential to dismantle national capacities. The state (nation-state), the form of political organization in modern times, is facing fundamental challenges in the context of the new round of technological revolution. However, if we still regard the state as a special public power in class society, we can find that under the conditions of the new round of technological revolution, the performance of the state's awareness of maintaining its own power is not much different from that in history: when new political subjects and things that challenge their authority appear, they often take the lead in showing a strong desire to control, showing the will to include them in the category of disposable administrative power, in order to reaffirm state authority, enrich governance tools, and innovate state capacity.
But does the State still have the capacity to act efficiently to achieve this political intent? There is plenty of evidence that traditional state organizations have many weaknesses in terms of regulatory philosophy, regulatory strategies (which are highly controversial), regulatory tools, and supporting resources. For example, follow-up investigations have shown that the EU's investigation into allegations of anti-competitive tactics by technology giants took years and fined Google billions of dollars, but Google has not made many substantive changes and has had little significant impact on restoring market competition.
This article attempts to combine the experience of anti-monopoly of new technologies in different countries in the past two years, especially since 2020, to explore the political actions of the state against technology giants for what reasons or tasks, and the main tasks of the state to defend its own power are concentrated in the following four aspects: defending the boundaries and institutional capabilities of administrative governance, defending the "creative destruction" of technology, maintaining the market order of fair competition, and reversing the "revolving door" of technological politics. This article will discuss how countries can act around their tasks in the face of the expansion of technology giants in all dimensions and the broad and profound socio-political impact of new technologies. An analysis of the actual effectiveness and limits that these operations can achieve and the difficulties and challenges encountered will also be analysed.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="39" >▍ Defend administrative boundaries and effective institutional capacity</h1>
An important symbol of the success of modern "state construction" is that all market and social behaviors have clear and recognizable boundaries and limits, which are understood at the level of national capacity as the "legibility" of the market society to the state, that is, the state must have the ability to include the behavior of all social market entities into the scope of its executive power monitoring and domination. [1] However, in the context of the new technological revolution, the rapid development of new technologies has accelerated the environment for the exercise of government power, and the practicality of the original regulatory framework and regulatory tools to maintain the "legible ability" of the government and the limits of its power have been continuously challenged.
Tech giants create a uniform identifier for each single person. In the Facebook system, everyone will have a unique ID, and the personal ID is the basis for tech giants to edit almost all product classification tags or technical analysis. This means that the tech giants have adopted the same legibility system as governments, and it has the ability to achieve a systematic "taxation" on society. To that end, technology companies have also adopted price discrimination tactics similar to government behavior, and many tech companies are spending more and more effort to achieve near-perfect price discrimination. [2]
The advertising auction mechanisms of some large technology companies encourage bidders to pay the expected marginal profit for traffic. Companies like Amazon, which started out in a non-advertising model, ended up using advertising to capture the last bit of profit that suppliers retained. In addition to building a readability system, every large high-tech company is also trying to control a social standard measurement system, through a monopoly standard guide, to ensure that the basic unit of some kind of social interaction belongs to them, so as to build a sustainable and profitable long supply chain system. From the perspective of the national fiscal and tax extraction function, the administrative capacity of the technology giants far exceeds that of traditional government organizations, and is more like a phenomenon-level political species that "looks like a state" in the sense of political scientist James Scott.
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Review the platform monopoly ¥38 purchase
In the Internet economy, the collection of taxes on individuals is a major capacity challenge for many countries. For the state, the technology company's own superpower constitutes a barrier to legibility; but at the practical level, it is also the government's solution to the accessibility barrier. For governments with weaker national capacities, they have had to adopt a certain "feudal" model that grants powerful privileges to technology companies. A classic example is that the Indonesian government has largely outsourced business tax revenues to technology giants, suggesting that large technology companies have the capacity to resemble local governments at the national level.
The "feudalism" referred to here is not a "territory" or "enclave" in the traditional sense of loss of control, but some kind of super complexity and unknowability. The real monopoly of the technology giant is not due to its size and structure, but is deeply rooted in the technical characteristics of the technology giant and the characteristics of the process of power exercise - the micro operation of power is deeply embedded in the socio-economic and political system. In a world dominated by technology giants, a large number of micro-trading behaviors have emerged, resulting in exponential information asymmetries, which not only exponentially increase the institutional cost of government supervision, but also because many phenomena actually exceed administrative capacity and institutional limits, it is often difficult for governments to innovate regulatory tools in a timely manner, so that potential risks cannot be identified.
The power operation mode of technology giants is more highly hidden, ambiguous and volatile than that of traditional monopoly industrial groups, and it is not only like a super power body that concentrates data, capital and technology, but also a complex system full of power and invisible. This complex system combines the triple advantages of a high degree of concentration of power, intelligent management of domination (domination) technology, and distributed extraction of resources (data), forming a power system with a unified will and a loose, coupled, and open ability to draw.
A former Google employee used this metaphor at a seminar organized by The New York Times to the impact of tech giants on the nation's organizational system: 100 years ago, antitrust, the problem that surfaced looked like an iceberg, and the problems were all on the surface; in the data age, only 10% of the icebergs were exposed, and 90% were hidden under the iceberg. With the in-depth application of AI and data development systems in the future, the system locking ability of technology giants will make their risks far below the waterline. The "antitrust law" implemented by Western countries at present is derived from the creation of the steam engine era, which is a legislative product of the scale and structural characteristics of the main body of the market at that time, and the main means are splitting and punishment; but for the monopoly "process" of the technical power that constitutes the connotation of the "monopoly" of the technology giants, there is a fundamental lack of effective enforcement measures and means.
The challenges of technology giants vis-à-vis national institutional capacities are not only at the domestic level, but also at the international level. The internationalization of technology giants, whether based on the organization itself or the expansion of technological capabilities, has gradually evolved into a new type of political force that breaks through national borders. Compared with traditional multinationals, technology giants have more technical and organizational capabilities to penetrate national sovereignty. The turning point in the state system's perception of tech giants came during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, marked by Cambridge Analytica's intervention in the U.S. election using Facebook's shared data and personal profiling technology, which also made more policymakers aware of the easier penetration of foreign powers.
On the flip side of the coin, protecting national strategic interests and competitive advantages remains the highest priority for countries in the Internet and digital domains. In this area, whether it is the construction of critical infrastructure or the integration of advanced technologies in defense and intelligence architectures, technology companies, especially giants, provide innovative products to governments and still play a key role in improving and improving national capabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has further exacerbated the power and impact of technology giants. In the past, centralized decision-making and management systems are gradually releasing the "weak center" management system in which technology enterprises participate, which further intensifies the distributed management of manpower, capital and technology, and technology giants have become an important subject responsible for crisis management. The social blockade implemented by technology companies is no longer the traditional government's natural blockade of sea, land, air and other fields and spaces, it has more new characteristics, and the potential impact on society may be beyond the imagination of existing historical experience.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="60" >▍ Defend against "creative destruction" shocks</h1>
Worldwide, the application of new technologies has opened up new business changes and changes in social lifestyles, creating new economic forms and growth models, but also bringing with it the problem of "creative destruction" as the economist Schumpeter called. The creative destruction here may not only involve the protection of social privacy in data management and innovation competition, but also the intensive and fierce innovation competition may shatter the original stable economic and social structure and undermine social stability and cohesion; at the same time, it may also involve the increasingly serious social differentiation and the negative impact on the national development pattern and regional imbalance.
The power of the new technology giants is deeply rooted in the daily life and consumption of the public, mastering massive data and market transaction information. Harvard sociologist Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "surveillance capitalism" to describe what she understands as the "economic logic of neo-tech capitalism," which includes the logic of "transforming things that live outside of market dynamics, such as human experience, into commodities." The dominance of the tech giants makes it possible to treat consumer privacy at will. Consumers are forced to use a service with poor privacy protection, or they will have to abandon it altogether.
Google was one of the first companies to recognize the value of quickly collecting and dataizing and commoditizing online habits. In February 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a public complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice alleging that TikTok illegally collected information from minors under the age of 13 without parental consent. In late 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission conducted a similar survey of Twitter for using the personal phone numbers of users as a method of account verification for targeted ad serving. In a report, Competition and Markets argued that Google and Facebook are collecting and using personal information for personalized advertising with little restriction.
However, from the experience of Western countries, government actions against technology giants that violate data privacy protections are constrained by great technical capabilities at the level of legal implementation. There are reports that efforts to restrict the collection of data by big tech companies have generally failed since the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation. An important reason is that the technical maintenance that underpins the implementation of the law has been entrusted to Ireland, which does not have sufficient technical monitoring capacity and resources to ensure effective legislative implementation. Another problem is that state compliance management and penalties for data collection and use appear to have little deterrent effect on tech giants. According to an investigation in The Economist magazine, the maximum fine imposed by the European Union so far against a US tech giant is only 1% of the market value of the large tech companies targeted. [3]
The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the technology giant's access to and disruption of public privacy online. Reports suggest that Facebook and Google have built almost a huge number of user profiles, and they can sell staggering amounts of advertising dollars based on these profiles, even if some advertisers think it is unethical to buy this information, but they have no choice in the existing competitive environment. What's more, measures that appear to promote consumer privacy protection may have an anti-competitive effect. For example, at the hearing of the US Congress against technology giants, some people pointed out that Apple uses the concept of privacy as an "umbrella", and the so-called "technological improvements" made in the name of privacy are actually aimed at strengthening Apple's competitive advantage.
Another important manifestation of "creative destruction" is the profound impact of the application of new Internet technologies on inequality in the economic and social spheres. The question of whether the application of technology has enhanced the well-being of society in general has always been a huge question. For years, Western scholars have suspected that high technology will change the hierarchy of cities because it favors more skilled workers. A decade-old study showed that the earlier cities adopt personal computers, the faster relative wage growth. [4] Research by Princeton University economist Elisa Giannone further demonstrates that wage differentials between U.S. cities since 1980 have been driven by technology-driven clustering, with wages of highly skilled workers rising faster in areas where tech companies are concentrated. On the flip side, low-skilled workers around the world , including low-level employees at tech companies like Amazon and freelancers who use platforms like Uber to find customers — are facing deteriorating working conditions and near-stagnant wages.
The impact of new technologies on the balance of economic development is far more than this, and from the development experience of Western countries, the impact of new technologies on the national development pattern is huge. There is a lot of evidence that the gap between the booming coastal science and technology centers and the smaller inland cities is widening, and digital technology has made a significant contribution to the differentiated development of the urban economy, and of course, it has brought more intense social suffering to the laggards. New research from Brookings University shows that a small group of highly digitized coastal technology centers are increasingly at odds with other regions in terms of measures of economic growth and income. The study's analysis of employment data from 53 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million U.S. residents since 2015 shows that the population of several major hub cities where technology giants gather account for only half of the country's total urban population, but account for more than three-quarters of the country's employment growth. In contrast, smaller urban areas lag behind significantly, while urban and rural areas experience stagnation or negative growth. In short, the technological revolution has exacerbated America's growing geographic imbalances and urban-rural disparities.
In the early years, economist Michael Baxter and entrepreneur John Straw analyzed in their books whether emerging technologies had a "trickle-down effect" on economic development. The answer is no. They emphasize that new technologies themselves have the potential to exacerbate social inequality: "First, the existence of patents may mean that much of the wealth created by innovation can increase the wealth of the richest people in society, but limit the realization of the 'trickle-down effect'. Second, there are actually more items that are available online for free. The problem is that the only means of funding digital products is advertising, an industry where revenue is increasingly dominated by a handful of tech giants. ”[5]
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="81" >▍ Maintain the market order of fair competition</h1>
The new internet technology was once hailed as a powerful democratic force that enabled innovative start-ups to compete with incumbents, change the landscape of entire industries and create new ones. However, as these startups grew into behemoths, their development turned to the opposite side of things. As a representative of a domestic technology giant claims that they represent the "innovation" of the market, but whether based on international experience or theoretical research, there is no evidence to support this conclusion. Instead, the tech giants themselves are the biggest factors that hinder and inhibit innovation and fair competition.
On October 9, 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released an antitrust investigation report, condemning Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook for using "deadly acquisitions" to suppress rivals, charge excessive fees, and force small businesses to sign "oppression contracts", and the report made some antitrust recommendations, including forcing technology companies to spin off and implementing business restructuring.
An important reason why tech giants maintain a monopolistic competitive position is that the giants' investment in small businesses has a significant "siphon effect". Early-stage U.S. investment in new ventures has continued to decline over the past decade, and the rate of entrepreneurship in the digital market, defined as the "share of startups and young companies" across the industry, has also fallen significantly, from 60 percent in 1982 to less than 30 percent in 2020.
A recent joint study by the University of Chicago suggests that online tech giants have a natural advantage in securing investment, with a well-known "innovation kill zone" in the technology investment space, in which platforms that already dominate are hardly subject to competitive pressure because investors tend to avoid investing in companies where tech giants have direct or indirect competition. The study also suggests that acquisitions by large companies in the digital economy are an important reason for the decline in investment in startups. When large companies find competitive small businesses in the industry, they often take the initiative to eliminate these competitions, and the most effective method is direct acquisition, which is called "killer acquisition". [6]
There are many cases that can prove the above judgment, such as Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, which was secretly called "land grabbing" internally. Amazon has acquired at least 100 companies over the past two decades, and its ambitions have ballooned in recent years, especially in recent years. From acquiring direct competitors Zappos and Quidsi to acquiring Chinese startup Blink, which is engaged in smart furniture security business, Amazon has added a large number of customer data reserves to ensure its monopoly position. In addition, the survey found that Amazon intimidated third-party sellers on its platform, forced arbitration, increased seller fees, occupied third-party seller data, and bundled house ads.
As an important issue in the action of antitrust states, it is how to protect the survival and rights of smaller participants operating under the new business logic. However, the monopoly position of the technology giants is almost unshakable, and the essence of their monopoly position is not in the scale and structure, but in the power characteristics of the technology giants. In google, for example, there are two main factors that keep it out of external competition: first, the high cost of search servers; second, the self-reinforcing advantage of clicks and query data, allowing search engines to continuously improve the relevance of search results. Considering that Google's search algorithm has been continuously improved through trillions of queries, even an upstart who can secure the necessary capital to invest heavily in computing infrastructure will find itself at a considerable disadvantage.
The U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust report found that Google maintained its search monopoly by determining its advantages through data theft and its own prioritization methods, and improving search results by obtaining information from unauthorized third parties. At the same time, Google has also made changes in search to give its services an edge and put competitors' products at a disadvantage. In October 2020, Republican Rep. Ken Buck, a member of the antitrust panel on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, confirmed in an interview with CNN that the report surveyed many employees of technology giants, "most employees accurately portray how Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook used their monopoly power as market gatekeepers, undermining potential competition and picking winners and losers".
In this sense, digital platforms are natural monopolies. Traditional antitrust methods tend to break it down, eliminating their scale advantages. However, some scholars have suggested that over the past decade, antitrust law enforcement has not blocked any of the hundreds of acquisitions by mainstream platform companies. As a result, it is unclear whether a new round of antitrust action and divergence expectations will ultimately succeed. The main obstacles and limitations include: first, the need to overhaul the entire legal system surrounding antitrusts in order for it to be achieved and ultimately successful; second, that increased competition does not address the natural monopoly dynamics inherent in the platform economy; and third, that antitrust by technology giants involves more complex international cooperation than ever before. As the Economist magazine analysis quoted above shows, although some European regulators and legislators have set up regulatory guardrails for technology giants ahead of the United States, the maximum fine so far is only 1% of the market value of the penalized target, which makes it even more difficult to imagine how the EU will split a US company on its own. The anti-giant's "transatlantic" cooperation remains a blank slate to this day. [8]
Given the fundamental change that digital platforms have changed the way markets operate, it has been argued that neither splitting the tech giants nor divesting the giants' stakes in smes in finance, technology and other fields (which is exactly what China is currently doing with Alibaba) will be of no significant utility. Governments must go beyond traditional antitrust thinking.
It has been suggested that an effective approach would be to promote data openness for tech giants. For example, modeled on the traditional way of financial institution regulation, if a technology company has more than 50,000 personal accounts, it should be subject to certain regulations, such as the need to force it to open the Application Programming Interface (API), requiring big Banking and Big Tech to provide API access to customer data, so that all market players can access consumer data equally, which can prevent the stronger the stronger. It can also promote the emergence of new competitors and thus maintain the opening of the market to competition. However, it has also been suggested that this may promote competition, but it may also lead to serious privacy violations. Cambridge Analytica used the shared information of technology giants to infiltrate the U.S. election. How to ensure that the two are coordinated with each other is clearly beyond the existing regulatory capacity of the state.
Another approach is to ensure that the interests of tech giants are more widely shared. For example, shares can be dispersed to individuals through platforms of a certain size required by regulations, and also used to fund domestic and global public goods. Some Western scholars have put forward a more radical approach, arguing that if there is no systematic intervention in the corporate structure (ownership, control, pricing power) of technology giants, the centralized monopoly of giants will be difficult to avoid. As a means of making some or all of the large platform companies publicly owned (wholly or through a controlling or majority stake), it is necessary to form autonomous public trusts composed of a multi-stakeholder representative composed of workers, consumers, government officials and the public, while structurally restructuring the platform companies with embedded democratic governance structures and new public interest principles.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="107" >▍ torsion technology-politics "revolving door"</h1>
For many people now, big platforms are what they depend on; however, these platforms have almost irrevocable powers. Although large platforms have repeatedly been found to be illegal by courts and law enforcement agencies, their power has expanded at an alarming rate and their ability to influence the policy-making process has become increasingly strong. Worldwide, tech giants have developed a powerful political lobbying force. In 2012, Amazon ranked 221st in spending on federal lobbying groups, and by 2019, it had ranked 18th, not far from Google's parent company Alphabet (ranked 8th). Since 2018, large companies have intensified their lobbying for policy implications, along with the prevailing wave of resistance to technology in the Western public and the consequent government regulatory scrutiny.
For a long time, technology companies have lobbied through direct lobbying and funding of think tanks and academic research, but one of the main pillars of technology company success has been the creation of a strong pressure group to deal with political and regulatory decision makers. The lobbying methods of tech giants have changed significantly in recent years around the achievement of key policy objectives. The traditional model was designed to maximize the interests of their own companies, and now they have become the actual decision makers. They are no longer knockers, but instead they are increasingly seen as important voices in the decision-making room. The image of tech giants as "others" has been blurred, and they are consolidating their positions on the political stage, and the key mechanism behind this is a new type of political "revolving door" that exists between tech giants and decision-making bodies.
Large enterprises strengthen their monopoly position by creating a kind of personnel "revolving door" in order to gain substantive decision-making power or the power to influence decision-making. Dominating the market through political power not only curbs innovation, but also hurts the market, especially small businesses. According to sources, the revolving door problem focuses on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where almost all top FTC officials become lobbyists or members of lawyers and consulting for technology companies after leaving office.
Public Citizen, a U.S. consumer advocacy group, surveyed former and current officials from two of the FTC's internal departments (Consumer Protection and Competition) and found that there may be a close interest between these decision-makers and those they regulate. The group found that more than 75 percent of the FTC's senior officials (31 of the 41) in the past 20 years have either served the interests of the company after leaving the organization (conflict with the FTC) or joined the FTC after serving the interests of the company. Google alone has employed more than 197 former senior government officials since 2005, including the FTC. [9] This had visible political implications: although the FTC had several times restricted the tech giants' M&A practices in the name of curbing competition and innovation, they all ended in failure.
At the same time, many people from Silicon Valley's tech giants are also entering the public service through the "revolving door" mechanism. In the process, large tech companies have fostered influential networks of advocates both inside and outside government. This political engagement and influence could weaken the U.S. Congress's current efforts to regulate new technologies. Tech giants, for example, are trying to overturn California's Consumer Privacy Act by pushing Congress to enact an alternative policy that was developed on the proposal of the industry associations they fund.
For countries, closing the revolving door between governments and tech giants seems to be the most straightforward solution, but some analysts believe that this is not the solution to the puzzle. Zuckerberg's poor performance of legislators during congressional testimony in 2018 proved that Congress needs to know enough about the technology sector and its products to achieve effective regulation, but that this requirement can only be achieved by bringing in talent from technology giants. In addition, if action is taken, it may cause a strong policy shock to the detriment of those who have cross-served through the revolving door system.
Therefore, it was also suggested that, rather than closing the revolving door, efforts should be focused on the enforcement mechanism for the implementation of legislation in order to prevent it from becoming a tool for exerting undue influence. For example, a more formal platform can be established for stakeholders, a more independent and objective argument for policy can be provided, and the necessary restrictions on the political connections of former officials in lobbying can be imposed.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="123" >▍ Conclusion</h1>
In the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the accelerated rise of technology giants and the accelerated formation of monopolies have developed into a world-class political phenomenon. An analysis of the series of events and experiences of the manufacturing of technology giants shows that the concept and theory of "monopoly", which is based on the modern industrial system and social power since the 19th century, seems difficult to understand the specific connotation and complex impact of the monopoly of new technology giants.
The essence of the monopoly of technology giants lies not in the huge market size and organizational structure, but in the complex power and organizational characteristics of technology giants. The state's vigilance and management of the monopoly position of technology giants and their secondary disasters is an instinctive reaction of the original political system and organizational system, and a logical manifestation of the state based on its own tasks and organizational goals.
However, as this article demonstrates, the ability of states to act efficiently to promote the realization of their political intentions appears to be greatly hampered. Behind this is not only the arduous challenge brought about by the complexity of the phenomenon of monopoly of technology giants itself, but also reflects that the state power is not fully prepared in terms of the theoretical strategy, technical tools and resource reserves of technology giants anti-monopoly. The continuous game and future development of these two forces are worthy of continuous observation.
This article was originally published in Culture Magazine, No. 1, 2021, and was originally titled "Taming Technology Giants: The National Logic of Antitrust Action." The image comes from the Internet, if there is infringement, please contact to delete. Welcome to share personally, please contact this public account for media reprints.