8 October 2021. Tech | K-everything
The key to breaking up the tech monopolists: Interoperability; the OED’s Korean invasion
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The key to breaking up the tech monopolists is interoperability
As the song goes: How do we solve a problem like Facebook? For some reason, this seems like a good week to return to this topic, and to a piece by the writer and blogger Cory Doctorow who thinks he has a solution. The solution is interoperability.
I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m picking on Facebook, by the way. Other systemically difficult global tech companies are also available.
But back to Cory Doctorow. He has some history here, since he spent time working for the pressure group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But he isn’t just concerned about the tech sector: he has a strong belief that monopolies are a bad thing, and that they have been allowed to develop more or less unchecked since the years of the Reagan administration 40 years ago.
Despite the many disadvantages of the concentration of monopoly or oligopoly power, there isn’t yet a popular or populist trust-busting movement to break them up. Except—just perhaps—in the tech sector. In the absence of such a popular movement, you need to look for your wins where you might actually win something. Hence the tech sector:
Tech is in very bad odor right now. Few voters’ first priority is Doing Something About Tech, but likewise, few voters trust or like the tech industry. There’s already antitrust action pending against several major tech companies in multiple US states, at the federal level, and abroad. Tech was the first new industry to grow up without meaningful antitrust enforcement... But it’s not just the fact that tech is in trustbusters’ crosshairs that makes it the ideal first step in a path to total antitrust victory. The most important thing about tech, from a competition perspective, is the underlying, technical nature of networked computers.
The point here is that while the path to monopoly tends to follow the same route—mostly of mergers and acquisitions of larger companies, and buying smaller innovators before they become a nuisance—the road out of monopoly depends on the specific structure of each industry, and. Its specific pressure points.
In tech, that pressure point is interoperability.
Despite all the handwringing over the inaccessibility of old digital data, the reality is that new computers can emulate old computers and run the programs that were used to create and read that data in the deep past of computing.
(Source: imgflip.com)
The thing that helps tech companies to grow is network effects—the value of the network, to everyone, is a function (more or less) of the square of the humber of users. (This is Metcalfe’s Law: the formula is actually x(x-1)/2), where x is the number of users)
The thing that keeps them big, once they’ve grown, is switching costs—the barriers to moving somewhere else. And Doctorow argues that although switching costs get a lot less attention than network effects when people discuss tech monopolies, they are actually a lot more important:
Today, people struggle to leave Facebook because doing so involves leaving behind their friends. Those same friends are stuck on Facebook for the same reason. People join Facebook because of network effects (which creates a monopoly), but they stay on Facebook because of the high switching costs they face if they leave (which preserves the monopoly).
But here’s the thing: if you change your mobile phone company, you can still message your friends on the other networks. The fact that you can’t do this if you leave Facebook isn’t an inherent property of the technology. Hence the value of interoperability is that it makes switching simpler—and that undermines the tech monopolies:
Interoperability lowers switching costs. Switching costs reverse network effects. If you can talk to people on Facebook without using Facebook, then Facebook becomes a reason to sign up for any service, not just Mark Zuckerberg’s walled garden. Likewise for app stores (if you can take your apps with you, that’s one less reason not to switch from Android to iPhone or vice versa).
Which is the reason that small growing companies like interoperability, until they become large extractionist monopolies, when they change their tune. Even Facebook was a believer in interoperability when it was small.
There’s a lot more to this article, and the whole thing is a great read, but the final bit of it that I want to share here is the way that you’d play this out in practice.
That’s where antitrust comes in. The tech companies have no appetite to litigate antitrust suits to the bitter end. These suits take a long time..., cost a lot of money..., and they’re incredibly painful...
That’s why antitrust cases usually end in settlements, not judgments. Normally, the focus of these settlements is fines... But settlements can come with conditions, “conduct remedies,” spelling out what the companies must do as a condition of continuing to operate.
And interoperability could be one of those conditions. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The tech companies would go out of their way to undermine it, as the car companies did during the early 21st century. Doctorow’s solution to this is to create a requirement of “competitive compatibility” if businesses degrade their services to try to undermine the interoperability—which effectively opens up the service to competitors who will deliver those services. And the reason this might work is that—for a large monopolist—complying with a “competitive compatibility” requirement is complicated and expensive:
As Doctorow says the best solution to monopolies is to break them up. But we’re a long way from that. So we might as well start somewhere that has a chance of working:
tech’s flexibility – that protean, foundational ability to plug everything into everything else – means that tech trustbusters have a uniquely suitable tool for prying apart monopolies: interoperability. Forcing interop back into tech won’t be the end of the anti-monopoly fight, but it’ll be the end of the beginning – the necessary but insufficient step we’ll take before moving on to far more ambitious projects.
#2: The OED’s K-invasion
It’s easy to look at the rhetoric about the ‘Asian century’ and have your attention diverted towards China, because of the economics and the geopolitics.
But Korea is the cultural innovator of Asia, and its inflence is spreading. As the OED blog mentioned this week:
We are all riding the crest of the Korean wave, and this can be felt not only in film, music, or fashion, but also in our language, as evidenced by some of the words and phrases of Korean origin included in the latest update of the Oxford English Dictionary.
No fewer than 21 words of Korean origin were added to the OED in September. A lot of these are about food, and a lot are about culture:
It was the success of K-pop and K-dramas that initially fuelled the rise of international interest in South Korean pop culture, a phenomenon that is now so widespread that it has not one but two names that have just entered the OED: hallyu and Korean wave, both first seen in 2001. Hallyu, a borrowing from Korean, also means ‘Korean wave’ when literally translated, and it is now also being used in English to refer to South Korean pop culture and entertainment itself, not just its increasing popularity.
(Image of a Mukbang video on Wikipedia. Source: 지식테이너김승훈, CC BY 3.0)
There might be more detail here than anyone but a committed etymologist will enjoy, but some of the cultural words also attest to the increasing breadth of Korean cultural reference points in English. (The dates are first known English usage):
Also making it into this batch are the words aegyo (1997), a certain kind of cuteness or charm considered characteristically Korean, similar to the Japanese word kawaii; manhwa (1988), a Korean genre of cartoons and comic books; mukbang (2013), a video featuring a person eating a large quantity of food and talking to the audience; and the typical Korean expression daebak (2009), an interjection expressing enthusiastic approval used in a similar way to ‘fantastic!’ and ‘amazing!’.
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