Must-read: Ben Thompson: “Antitrust and Aggregation”

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Antitrust and Aggregation: “With zero distribution costs and zero transaction costs…

…consumers are attracted to an aggregator through the delivery of a superior experience, which attracts modular suppliers, which improves the experience and thus attracts more consumers, and thus more suppliers in the aforementioned virtuous cycle. It is a phenomenon seen across industries including search (Google and web pages), feeds (Facebook and content), shopping (Amazon and retail goods), video (Netflix/YouTube and content creators), transportation (Uber/Didi and drivers), and lodging (Airbnb and rooms, Booking/Expedia and hotels)…. All things being equal the equilibrium state in a market covered by Aggregation Theory is monopoly: one aggregator that has captured all of the consumers and all of the suppliers.

This monopoly, though, is a lot different than the monopolies of yesteryear…. Consumers are self-selecting onto the Aggregator’s platform because it’s a better experience. This has completely neutered U.S. antitrust law, which is based on whether or not there has been clear harm to the consumer… it’s why the FTC has declined to sue Google for questionable search practices….

Once competitors die the aggregators become monopsonies — i.e. the only buyer for modularized suppliers. And this, by extension, turns the virtuous cycle on its head: instead of more consumers leading to more suppliers, a dominant hold over suppliers means that consumers can never leave, rendering a superior user experience less important than a monopoly that looks an awful lot like the ones our antitrust laws were designed to eliminate….

There was one remedy from the European Commission settlement with Microsoft that actually worked out quite well: Windows was required to document interoperability protocols for work group servers, which while designed for the benefit of established competitors like Sun, was actually more important for the open-source Samba project. Samba made it possible for non-Windows PCs and servers to be fully compatible with Windows-based networks, making it viable to use a Mac or Linux machine in corporate environments, or (more importantly) in corporate data centers, one of the first areas where the Windows monopoly started to come apart. Of course Windows remained dominant on the desktop thanks to its application lock-in…. Both of these approaches — interoperability and API disclosure — could be solutions when it comes to defusing the market power of aggregators…