About
The mission of the Technology & Power program is to ensure that new technologies always serve the interest of the public as a whole and cannot be used to concentrate dangerous degrees of power and control over the actions or thoughts of individuals, groups, or entire societies. The program does so by developing and advocating for policies that ensure that individuals can communicate news and ideas with one another, and trade goods and services with one another, free of interference by any private or public gatekeeper. It is based on the idea that many networks and network applications are inherently monopolistic in nature and hence must be regulated by the people to ensure equal, unbiased, and reasonably priced services to all individuals who use the networks and applications.
Traditionally, the United States and most other nations used common carrier law and related forms of regulation to ensure that businesses that control essential services treat all buyers and sellers the same. But a generation ago, Chicago School legal scholars began to promote the idea that it would be “efficient” to allow powerful monopolists to discriminate in how they treat different people. One result is that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and other monopoly middlemen have been left free to deliver different prices, information, and services to each individual user. Another result was the Trump administration’s dangerous lifting of common carrier rules in 2018 for internet service providers.
The political and economic dangers of this license are extreme and growing. The largest platform monopolists today enjoy a de facto license to manipulate the flow of news, information, ideas, and commerce between citizen and citizen within the United States. This control over the gate to the market gives these corporations the ability to extort both money and political favors even from very large corporations who depend on their services, and to censor communications largely as they alone see fit.
Open Markets first began to warn of these dangers more than a decade ago, and pioneered analysis of how Google, Amazon, and Facebook wield this power in ways that threaten democracy and individual liberty. Over the years, we have taken a leading role in working with legislators, regulators, and grassroots activists in Washington, state capitols, and across Europe to develop enforcement strategies, policies, and laws to address the immediate threat and to identify permanent solutions.
