Digital Platforms

Information Fiduciaries: Good Framework, Bad Solution.

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By and large, human beings reason by analogy. We learn a basic rule, usually from a specific experience, and then generalize it to any new experience we encounter that seems similar. Even in the relatively abstract area of policy, human beings depend on reasoning by analogy. As a result, when looking at various social problems, the first thing many people do is ask “what is this like?” The answer we collectively come up with then tends to drive the way we approach the problem and what solutions we think address it. Consider the differences in policy, for example, between thinking of spectrum as a “public resource” v. “private property” v. “public commons” — although none of these actually describes what happens when we send a message via radio transmission.

 

As with all human things, this is neither good nor bad in itself. But it does mean that bad analogies drive really bad policy outcomes. By contrast, good analogies and good intellectual frameworks often lead to much better policy results. Nevertheless, most people in policy tend to ignore the impact of our policy frameworks. Indeed, those who mistake cynicism for wisdom had a tendency to dismiss these intellectual frameworks as mere post hoc rationalizations for forgone conclusions. And, in fact, sometimes they are. But even in these cases, the analogies till end up subtly influencing how the policies get developed and implemented. Because law and policy gets implemented by human beings, and human beings think in terms of frameworks and analogies.

 

I like to think of these frameworks and analogies as “deep structures” of the law. Like the way the features of geography impact the formation and course of rivers over time, the way we think about law and policy shapes how it flows in the real world. You can bulldoze through it, forcibly change it, or otherwise ignore these deep structures, but they continue to exert influence over time.

 

Case in point, the idea that personal information is “property.” I will confess to using this as a shorthand myself since 2016 when I started on the ISP privacy proceeding. My 2017 white paper on privacy legislative principles, I traced the evolution of this analogy from Brandies to the modern day, similar to other intangibles such as the ‘right of publicity.’ But as I also tried to explain, this was not meant as actual, real property but shorthand for the idea of a general, continuing interest. Unfortunately, as my Public Knowledge colleague Dylan Gilbert explains here, too many people have now taken this framework as meaning ‘treat property like physical property that can be bought and sold and have exclusive ownership.’ This leads to lots of problems and bad policies, since (as Dylan explains) data is not actually like physical property or even other forms of intangible property.

 

Which brings me to Professor Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and his “information fiduciaries” theory. (Professor Balkin has co-written pieces about this with several different co-authors, but it’s generally regarded as his theory.) Briefly (since I get into a bit more detail with links below), Balkin proposes that judges can (and should) recognize that the nature of the relationship between companies that collect personal information in exchange for services is similar to professional relationships such as doctor-patient or lawyer-client where the law imposes limitations on your ability to use the information you collect over the course of the relationship.

 

This theory has become popular in recent years as a possible way to move forward on privacy. As with all theories that become popular, Balkin’s information fiduciary theory has started to get some skeptical feedback. The Law and Political Economy blog held a symposium for information fiduciary skeptics and invited me to submit an article. As usual, my first draft ended up being twice as long as what they wanted. So I am now running the full length version below.

 

You can find the version they published here, You can find the rest of the articles from the symposium here. Briefly, I think relying on information fiduciaries for privacy doesn’t do nearly enough, and has no advantage over passing strong privacy legislation at the state and federal levels. OTOH, I do think the idea of a fiduciary relationship between the companies that collect and use personal information and the individuals whose information gets collected provides a good framework for how to think about the relationships between the parties, and therefore what sort of legal rights should govern the relationship.

 

More below . . .

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I Accidentally Write A Book On How To Regulate Digital Platforms.

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Some of you may have noticed I haven’t posted that much lately. For the last few months, I’ve been finishing up a project that I hope will contribute to the ongoing debate on “What to do about ‘Big Tech'” aka, what has now become our collective freak out at discovering that these companies we thought of as really cool turn out to control big chunks of our lives. I have now, literally, written the book on how to regulate digital platforms. Well, how to think about regulating them. As I have repeatedly observed, this stuff is really hard and involves lots of tradeoffs.

 

The Case for the Digital Platform Act: Market Structure and Regulation of Digital Platforms, with a Foreword by former FCC Chair (and author of From Gutenberg to Google) Tom Wheeler, covers all the hot topics (some of which I have previewed in other blog posts). How do we define digital platforms? How do we determine if a platform is ‘dominant’? What can we do to promote competition in the platform space? How do we handle the very thorny problem of content moderation and filter bubbles? How do we protect consumers on digital platforms, and how do we use this technology to further traditional important goals such as public safety? Should we preempt the states to create one, uniform national policy? (Spoiler alert, no.) Alternatively, why do need any sort of government regulation at all?

 

My employer, Public Knowledge, is releasing The Case for the Digital Platform Act free, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (v. 4.0) in partnership with the Roosevelt Institute. You can download the Foreword by Tom Wheeler here, the Executive Summary here, and the entire book here. Not since Jean Tirole’s Economics for the Common Good has there been such an amazing work of wonkdom to take to the beach for summer reading! Even better, it’s free — and we won’t collect your personal information unless you actively sign up for our mailing list!

 

Download the entire book here. You can also scroll down the page to links for just the executive summary (if you don’t want to print out all 216 pages) or just the Tom Wheeler foreword.

 

More, including spoilers!, below . . .

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What Makes Elizabeth Warren’s Platform Proposal So Potentially Important.

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As always when I talk politics, I remind folks that this blog is my personal blog, which I had well before I joined my current employer Public Knowledge. I’ve been commenting on Presidential campaigns since well before I joined PK, and I don’t run any of this stuff in front of my employer before I publish it.

 

 

Friday March 8, the Presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren, not to be confused with the actual office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), announced Warren’s plan for addressing the tech giants. Warren has been drawing attention to massive concentration in industry generally and tech specifically since well before it was cool, so the fat that she is out of the gate with a major proposal on this early in the 2020 campaign is no surprise. Nor is it a surprise that her proposed plan would end up breaking up, in some significant ways, the largest tech platforms.

 

What makes Warren’s contribution a potential game changer is that she goes well beyond the standard “break ’em up” rhetoric that has dominated most of the conversation to date. Warrens proposal addresses numerous key weaknesses I have previously pointed out in relying exclusively on antitrust and is the first significant effort to propose a plan for permanent, sustainable sector specific regulation. As my boss at public knowledge Gene Kimmelman has observed here, (and I’ve spent many 10s of thousands of words explaining) antitrust alone won’t handle the problem of digital platforms and how they impact our lives. For that we need sector specific regulation.

 

Warren is the first major Presidential candidate to advance a real proposal that goes beyond antitrust. As Warren herself observes, this proposal is just a first step to tackle on of the most serious problems that has emerged in the digital platform space, the control that a handful of giant platforms exercises over digital commerce. But Warren’s proposal is already smart in a number of important ways that have the potential to trigger the debate we need to have if we hope to develop smart regulation that will actually work to promote competition and curb consumer abuses.

 

I break these out below . . . .

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Apple v. Pepper: Can Illinois Brick Survive Ohio v. Amex, or Is Antitrust On Two Sided-Platforms Possible or Effectively Dead?

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Last term the Supreme Court decided Ohio v. American Express, an antitrust case in which the Supreme Court held that when analyzing whether conduct harmed consumers (and is thus a cognizable injury under the antitrust laws based on the current “consumer welfare standard“), if the object of the case is a two-sided market, the Court must analyze both sides of the market, i.e., the consumer facing side and the merchant facing side, to determine if the conduct causes harm. If vertical restraints on the merchant side of the platform produce benefits to consumers on the other side, then the restraints do not violate the antitrust law — even if they prevent new competitors from successfully emerging. In Ohio v. Amex, the court reasoned that an “anti-steering provision” that prevented merchants from directing consumers to other credit cards with lower swipe fees (the amount a merchant pays the card) was offset by Amex providing benefits such as travel services (at least to platinum members) and various discount and loyalty reward programs. The court found this consumer benefit offset the cost to merchants of the higher swipe fees (as the dissent observed, the majority did not address the finding of the district court that these higher swipe fees were passed on to consumers in the form of overall higher prices).

 

While Ohio v. Amex dealt with credit cards, folks like Lena Kahn have argued that because digital platforms such as Facebook are also “two-sided markets,” this decision will make it extremely difficult to go after digital platforms. As long as the company justifies its conduct by pointing to a consumer benefit, such as giving the product away for free (or selling at a reduced cost in the case of companies like Amazon), it is hard to understand what harm to the folks on the other side of the market will satisfy the consumer welfare standard. Or, in other words, it would appear under Ohio v. Amex that even if a firm like Amazon or Facebook does things to prevent a competitor or extract monopoly rents from the non-consumer side, as long as consumers benefit in some way everything is cool.

Others have argued, however, that we should not read Ohio v. Amex as bleakly as this. Since the majority did not address the findings of the district court, the majority did not rule out that exercise of market power over the merchant side could never cause harm to consumers and thus violate the consumer welfare standard. Rather, taking the decision at face value, those more optimistic about the future of antitrust and two-sided markets maintain that the district court erred in Amex by focusing on the harm to competition, rather than how that harm directly impacted consumers (again, the dissent points out the district court did focus on the harm to consumers, but the majority makes no comment on these findings, so there is no negative case law about whether a merchant voluntarily passing on the higher swipe fees in overall higher prices is a cognizable harm).

 

Recently, the Supreme Court heard argument in Apple v. Pepper.  As I explain below, although Apple v. Pepper addresses standing rather than a finding of a violation of the antitrust law itself, it should provide further guidance on whether antitrust law remains relevant in the era of two-sided markets. More below . . . .

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We Need To Fix Media, Not Just Social Media — Part III

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This is part of a continuing series of mine on platform regulation published by my employer, Public Knowledge. You can find the whole series here. You can find the original of this blog post here. This blog post is Part 3 of a three part series on media and social media. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here. This version includes recommendations that are my own, and have not been reviewed by, or endorsed by, Public Knowledge.

 

And now . . . after more than 6,000 words of background and build up . . . my big reveal on how to fix the problems in media! You’re welcome.

 

Somewhat more seriously, I’ve spent a lot of time in Part 1 and Part 2 reviewing the overall history of the last 150 years of how technology and journalism inter-relate  because two critically important themes jump out. First, the evolution in communications technology always results in massive changes to the nature of journalism by enabling new forms of journalism and new business models. Sometimes these changes are positive, sometimes negative. But the dominance of the large media corporations financing news production and distribution through advertising revenue is not a natural law of the universe or necessarily the best thing for journalism and democracy. The Internet generally, and digital platforms such as news aggregators and social media specifically, are neither the solution to the dominance of corporate media as optimists hoped it would be or the source of all media’s problems as some people seem to think. Digital platforms are tools, and they have the same promise to utterly revolutionize both the nature of journalism and the business of generating and distributing news as the telegraph or the television.

 

In Part 2, I looked at how activists and journalists connected to social media used these tools in ways that changed the way in which the public observed the events unfolding in Ferguson in 2014, and how this challenged the traditional media narrative around race and policing in America. Combining the lessons from this case study with the broader lessons of history, I have a set of specific policy recommendations that address both the continued solvency of the business of journalism and steps to regain public trust in journalism.

 

More below . . .

 

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We Need To Fix News Media, Not Just Social Media — Part II

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This is part of a continuing series of mine on platform regulation published by my employer, Public Knowledge. You can find the whole series here. You can find the original of this blog post here. This blog post is Part 2 of a three part series on media and social media. Part 1 is here.

 

In Part I, I explained why blaming digital platforms generally (and Facebook and Google in particular) for the current dysfunctional news industry and the erosion of public trust in journalism is an incomplete assessment and therefore leads to proposed solutions that do not actually address the underlying problems. To recap briefly, we have seen since the mid-1990s the steady decline in the quality of journalism and increasing public distrust of traditional newspapers and broadcast news. Massive consolidation financed by massive debt prompting an ever smaller number of mega-companies to cut costs by firing reporters and closing news rooms, shifting from hard news (which is more expensive to produce) to infotainment and talking head punditry, and the rise of unabashedly partisan talk radio hosts and cable networks were causing the public to increasingly silo themselves in partisan echo chambers. The relentless drive of these media giants to use the news to cross-promote their products, the increasing perception that the news industry had failed to question the Bush Administration’s justification for the invasion of Iraq and general perception that corporate media slanted news coverage to further their corporate or political interests (an impression shared by many reporters as well) all contributed to public distrust with the media and the general decline in consumption of news from traditional outlets long before online advertising was a serious threat to revenue. Finally, the unshakably wrong perception by corporate media that the public have no interest in substantive political coverage (despite numerous surveys to the contrary) prompted an audience hungry for real reporting to look to the emerging Blogosphere and away from traditional journalists.

 

Again, to be clear, there are genuine and serious concerns with regard to the potential gatekeeper and market power of social media and other digital platforms. The incentive of platforms to encourage “engagement” – whether by inspiring agreement or inspiring anger – warps both news reporting and news consumption. This incentive encourages these platforms to promote extreme headlines, hyper-partisanship, and radicalization, which in turn encourages those trying to attract readers to increasingly move to ever more extreme language and positions. These problems require a set of their own solutions, which I will reserve for a future installment. In this post, I want to focus on how we can begin to repair the problems with our dysfunctional news industry and the crisis of trust undermining journalism.

 

More Below . . .

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We Need To Fix The News Media, Not Just Social Media Part I

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A substantially similar version of this appeared on the blog of my employer, Public Knowledge.

Focusing blame Google and Facebook for the decline of in-depth news reporting and print journalism ignores the real and long-standing problems that lie at the heart of our troubled relationship with corporate media. Insisting that these companies should fund existing corporate media, or that we should solve the problem by allowing even more consolidation, would be a disaster for democracy.

Almost 20 years ago, I left private practice to work for a nonprofit law firm called Media Access Project (MAP). MAP focused on promoting policies designed to encourage the production of diverse news and views in the electronic media. When I joined MAP in July of 1999, we were facing a crisis of consolidation in the news industry, the rise of polarization, and the dissemination of “fake news” for both commercial and political purposes. Academics and pundits lamented the death of serious journalism, the tyranny of the ever faster news cycle, and the poisoning public discourse with increasingly coarse, angry, and vile commentary that pandered to people’s worst instincts. A new class of wildly popular and increasingly influential pundits sowed distrust for the “MSM” (“mainstream media”) and denounced anyone who disagreed with them as enemies of freedom. Meanwhile, the increasingly vertically and horizontally concentrated news industry cut costs by dramatically cutting reporting staff and reporting resources, and chased “synergies” by using the news to shamelessly cross-promote their entertainment and publishing products. News coverage was increasingly turning into “infotainment” (or, more politely, “soft news”). To the extent political coverage existed outside the polarized world of political punditry, it was reduced from genuine analysis to “horse race” coverage. No one in the news, it seemed, wanted to discuss actual substance – only which political party or politician was “winning” or “losing.” Even worse, a new cottage industry emerged to create and promote “fake news” in the form of Video News Releases and national syndicated broadcasts designed to appear both local and live.

Small wonder that audiences for news increasingly declined, and distrust of the media reached historic levels. To make matters even worse, the “cure” proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was to relax the remaining broadcast ownership rules, inviting further consolidation. Only by increasing consolidation, the industry argued, could the news industry survive in the face of fragmenting audiences, emerging competition from the internet, and declining newspaper revenues.

That was back in the late 1990s and early 00s. To quote Yogi Berra, “it’s déjŕ vu all over again.” Except this time, instead of blaming “the internet” and the public’s supposed lack of interest in real news, people now blame Google and Facebook. Why? Because they are big. Because they derive their revenue from digital advertising at a time when print journalism has seen revenue from classified advertising drop precipitously low. Because “Google and Facebook, we hates it precious!,” and one should never miss an opportunity to link a problem to Google and Facebook and proclaim “delenda est!” Likewise, the proposed remedies have a very familiar feel. Allow the news media to consolidate further by relaxing the FCC ownership rules and creating exemptions to existing antitrust law, and/or preserve their historic revenue stream from classified ads (either by destroying Google and Facebook or making them pay tribute to existing media companies). These solutions have particular appeal to incumbent publishers, as they simultaneously absolve the existing media of any responsibility for the current state of journalism and cement the dominance of the existing corporate media giants.

It is precisely because the stakes are so high, however, that we need to look with extreme skepticism at proposals primarily designed to prop up the current consolidated and dysfunctional media landscape. If we want to address the very real problems created by a dysfunctional media, we need to separate which of these problems can properly be attributed to dominant platforms and which to structural problems in the traditional news industry. Additionally, legitimate fears of the ability of dominant platforms to act as gatekeepers, or concerns about their outsized influence on the economics of news production and dissemination, should not justify solutions that destroy the extremely important role these platforms have played – and continue to play – in civic engagement and enhancing the creation of new and independent outlets for news.

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What Problem Does Cryptocurrency Solve? Ask Any Small Business — or the Collins Family.

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NY Times Columnist and Nobel Prizewinning economist Paul Krugman is a cryptocurrency skeptic. I don’t follow it closely enough to have an informed opinion, but I see nothing wrong with being skeptical of cryptocurrency. But after explaining his reasoning for skepticism, Krugman concludes with the following question:

“So that’s why I’m a crypto skeptic. Could I be wrong? Of course. But if you want to argue that I’m wrong, please answer the question, what problem does cryptocurrency solve? Don’t just try to shout down the skeptics with a mixture of technobabble and libertarian derp.”

Challenge accepted! Because while I respect Dr. Krugman and generally have similar politics, he has fallen into the classic mistake of establishment economists in this area. The current set of electronic transaction mechanisms works very well for him and most people like him — so why would anyone want to change? Other than for nefarious purposes, of course.

 

Short answer: The highly concentrated nature of the payment processing industry and the banking industry generally creates lots of hidden transaction costs, permits extraction of rents and imposition of onerous terms on merchants, and can be exploited by government to impose extra-legal sanctions on disapproved businesses or individuals without due process.

 

Even shorter answer: Cryptocurrency solves the gatekeeper problem and creates competition in electronic payment processing.

 

I unpack below, but it will speed things along if you first read the recent Supreme Court decision in Ohio v. Amex and this Washington Post article on how the Collins family of Kansas found their Bank of America account frozen.

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CPNI Is More Than Just Consumer Privacy — How To Apply It To Digital Platforms.

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This is the fourth blog post in a series on regulating digital platforms. A substantially similar version of this was published by my employer Public Knowledge. You can view the full series here. You can find the previous post in this series on Wetmachine here.

 

“Customer proprietary network information,” usually abbreviated as “CPNI,” refers to a very specific set of privacy regulations governing telecommunications providers (codified at 47 U.S.C. §222) and enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But while CPNI provides some of the strongest consumer privacy protections in federal law, it also does much more than that. CPNI plays an important role in promoting competition for telecommunications services and for services that require access to the underlying telecommunications network — such as alarm services. To be clear, CPNI is neither a replacement for general privacy nor a substitute for competition policy. Rather, these rules prohibit telecommunications providers from taking advantage of their position as a two-sided platform. As explained below, CPNI prevents telecommunications carriers from using data that customers and competitors must disclose to the carrier for the system to work.

All of which brings us to our first concrete regulatory proposal for digital platforms. As I discuss below, the same concerns that prompted the FCC to invent CPNI rules in the 1980s and Congress to expand them in the 1990s apply to digital platforms today. First, because providers of potentially competing services must expose proprietary information to the platform for the service to work, platform operators can use their rivals’ proprietary information to offer competing services. If someone sells novelty toothbrushes through Amazon, Amazon can track if the product is selling well, and use that information to make its own competing toothbrushes.

 

Second, the platform operator can compromise consumer privacy without access to the content of the communication by harvesting all sorts of information about the communication and the customer generally. For example, If I’m a mobile phone platform or service, I can tell if you are calling your mother every day like a good child should, or if you are letting her sit all alone in the dark, and whether you are having a long conversation or just blowing her off with a 30-second call. Because while I know you are so busy up in college with all your important gaming and fraternity business, would it kill you to call the woman who carried you for nine months and nearly died giving birth to you? And no, a text does not count. What, you can’t actually take the time to call and have a real conversation? I can see by tracking your iPhone that you clearly have time to hang out at your fraternity with your friends and go see Teen Titans Go To The Movies five times this week, but you don’t have time to call your mother?

 

As you can see, both to protect consumer privacy and to promote competition and protect innovation, we should adopt a version of CPNI for digital platforms. And call your mother more often. I’m just saying.

Once again, before I dig into the substance, I warn readers that I do not intend to address either whether the regulation should apply exclusively to dominant platforms or what federal agency (if any) should enforce these regulations. Instead, in an utterly unheard of approach for Policyland, I want to delve into the substance of why we need real CPNI for digital platforms and what that would look like.

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Using The Cost of Exclusion to Measure The Dominance of Digital Platforms.

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This is the third blog post in a series on regulating digital platforms. A version of this first appeared on the blog of my employer, Public Knowledge.

 

In my last blog post, I explained my working definition for what constitutes a “digital platform.” Today, I focus on another concept that gets thrown around a lot: “dominant.” While many regulations promoting consumer protection and competition apply throughout a sector, some economic regulations apply to “dominant” firms or firms with “market power.” Behavior that is harmless, or potentially even positive when done by smaller companies or in a more competitive marketplace, can be anticompetitive or harmful to consumers when done by dominant firms — regardless of the firm’s actual intent.

For reasons discussed in my previous blog posts, defining what constitutes “dominant” (or even identifying a single market in which to make such a determination), presents many challenges using the traditional tools of analysis favored by antitrust enforcers and regulators. I therefore propose that we use the cost of exclusion (“COE,” because nothing in policy is taken seriously unless it has its own acronym) as the means of determining when we need to apply regulation to “dominant” firms. That is to say, the greater the cost to individuals and firms (whether as consumers or producers or any of the other roles they may play simultaneously on digital platforms), the greater the need for regulations to protect platform users from harm. If a firm is “too big to lose access to,” then we should treat that firm as dominant.

 

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