TECH titans, having been good for a brief period, have turned really BAADD, The Economist's language for big, anti-competitive, addictive and destructive to democracy.
Small wonder, the European Union's antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, on Thursday, called on her fellow anti-competition busters around the world to join her in a global fight against Big Tech.
The world must take up Vestager's call. Here is why.
Firstly, Brussels isn't the world. Twenty-seven nations, however rich they are, do not make the world. At most, the EU is a region. And Big Tech isn't being BAADD in Europe alone.
All 198 nations of the world, including America, the home of almost all the tech titans, are victims of Big Tech's bad behaviour.
Secondly, Brussels isn't armed for the battle with the tech titans. This isn't this Leader's say-so. It is the 2020 assessment of the European Court of Auditors in an in-depth report of the bloc's 10 years of attempt at reining in the tech titans.
The Financial Times, which sighted the report, quotes the authors as saying: "The Commission has currently no tools in its hands that would allow it to intervene before competition problems would occur." True, the EU's latest try, the Digital Services Act, is a step in the right direction, but it is just a tame body punch.
The bloc's trust busters must aim for Big Tech's solar plexus. One reason why the antitrust tools — laws and others — are tame is because they are trying to tackle new world problems with old world contraptions.
Like looking at market shares of companies, prices of goods or services and profit margins. This is very old school.
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon — just to take four — are not four giant companies competing in the market. Each is a market by itself.
The EU's DSA or the US's antitrust laws are not made to tackle company-as-the-market errancy. Because, as one Brookings Institute report of Sept 23, 2020 put it, antitrust laws are blunt instruments "unable to reach many nuanced competition and consumer protection issues created by the digital economy".
Plus, enforcement of such instruments is "inherently uncertain in outcome, reliably lengthy in process, and an after-the-fact response rather than a broad-based set of rules".
According to the Financial Times, even the EU's first-ever antitrust case — against Google — 12 years ago was still making its way through the European Court of Justice in 2020 despite a fine of €2.4 billion imposed by Brussels. Such is the power of tech titans.
If they can't deny justice, they will delay it for as long as possible.
We reckon such regulations must be ones that are if-you-do-you-die kind of laws. For this to happen, the nations of the world must summon their political will to rein in the tech titans.
The economics of penalties is not good enough to tackle the woes caused by company-as-the-market space in the digital world.
Finally, antitrust measures are mostly after-the-fact cures. The tech titans will pay the fines, even if they are in billions, only to do it all over again.
To trillion-dollar companies, billion-dollar penalties are just small change. The best measure is one that stops the tech titans from being BAADD in the first place.
For this to happen, antitrust busters around the world need to work together to tame Big Tech.