Ahead of today’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law hearing, it is important to remember that: 

1. When it comes to browsing, purchasing, and starting a new business, consumers and founders have access to more online tools than ever.

2. “Glass-Steagall for the internet” is a dangerously misapplied framework when it comes to dynamic tech sectors.

3. Companies’ own services and private label goods are a longstanding, pro-consumer facet of doing business.

4. It is easier than ever for consumers to access and move their data across digital services.

5. Digital mapping is a fiercely competitive sector where new entrants are thriving.

1. When it comes to browsing, purchasing, and starting a new business, consumers and founders have access to more online tools than ever.

Free digital tools make it easier than ever to start an online business, explains CCIA’s Disruptive Competition Project. “It’s easier than ever to construct and run an online service. What was once the dominion of professional developers can now be a project undertaken by someone with the most basic computer skills, thanks to the variety of services that make building a website fast, easy, and cheap. There are approximately 64 million websites using CMSes — of which WordPress accounts for around 40% of the CMS market, yet there are a great number of services available.”

Consumers now have over 100 online retail channels to choose from, finds a 2021 ChannelAdvisor report. “A few years ago, sellers had a handful of onlines sales channels to choose from. Then came the explosion of e-commerce marketplaces, and the options available to consumers suddenly expanded far beyond the likes of Amazon. Online shoppers now have well over 100 channels to choose from — and 35% of consumers are spending more time than ever on non-Amazon marketplaces.”

Switching between search platforms is extremely easy, reminds Jessica Melugin of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “The ease of having a popular search engine preinstalled on a device benefits many consumers. Changing the default to suit individual preference is currently quick and cost free. Revenue generated from such contracts might very well offset the costs of the device to customers, saving them money. And search competitors seem able to compete; DuckDuckGo logged increases in daily searches every month this year.”

Just as consumers may choose to buy bread at a specialized bakery rather than a grocery store, consumers often choose specialized search tools instead of general search engines when searching for something specific. Boston University’s Michael Salinger explains: “General search engines have a natural advantage over thematic search engines in that they provide a sort of ‘one-stop shopping.’ But they also have an inherent disadvantage. A fundamental problem for search engines is to ascertain user intent. Search terms are inherently ambiguous, and different people entering the same search term might be looking for much different information. While thematic search sites have this problem to some extent, a query in Expedia is almost surely a travel search, and knowing the class of search makes it far easier to generate relevant results.”

2. “Glass-Steagall for the internet” is a dangerously misapplied framework when it comes to dynamic tech sectors.

Proponents of breaking up big tech misapply the concept behind Glass-Steagall, says American Action Forum’s Jennifer Huddleston. “Increasing marketplace competition was not the primary purpose of Glass-Steagall, but advocates for a ‘Glass-Steagall’ for technology see it as a way to correct what they view as anti-competitive behaviors. Such a separation between platforms and sellers on that platform is less akin to not allowing a bank to be in both the retail and investment sector, but more akin to not allowing Walmart and CVS to decide to sell their own products or where to place such products on their shelves.”

International Center for Law and Economics Competition Policy Director Sam Bowman highlights how such proposals are a “bad idea if your goal is cheaper, better products and more choice for consumers.” “[L]imits on whether platform companies can sell their own products on their platforms are a bad idea if your goal is cheaper, better products and more choice for consumers. Imagine if we proposed a rule like that for grocery stores. Walmart sells its own brand of milk, but also manages the stores in which other milk brands compete and sell to customers. Would consumers benefit if Walmart either had to discontinue its milk offering, or stop selling milk made by other companies?”

Breaking up tech companies by business line would harm small businesses that use tech tools to grow, states Jake Ward, President of the Connected Commerce Council. “Forcibly breaking apart digital platforms will eliminate the gains that many small businesses have enjoyed for nearly a decade. The competition debate cannot just be about the ‘big’ in Big Tech, as these platforms’ size and scale are precisely what enables them to provide small businesses with high-quality tools and services at affordable prices. The debate about Big Tech must include Main Street and the millions of small businesses that are the backbone of our economy and will drive our economic recovery.”

3. Companies’ own services and private label goods are a longstanding, pro-consumer facet of doing business.

Private label goods are “nearly as old as the retail industry itself,” shows PPI’s Alec Stapp. “The practice of using information about which products are selling well to develop private label goods is nearly as old as the retail industry itself. Sears launched its catalogue business in 1888. By 1927, the retailer was selling its own tools and appliances under the Craftsman and Kenmore in-house brands.”

NetChoice’s Carl Szabo points out that many major retailers, from grocery to apparel, supplement their inventory with private labels. “Today, we expect every store we walk into to have both their own branded products. Costco has Kirkland. Safeway has O Organics. Even CVS has its own line of Band-Aids. And most consumers like having these generic brands as options because they’re cheaper, force prices down of name brands, and can even push companies to improve their quality.”

Businesses make their tools more useful to consumers by offering enhanced services, describe Sam Bowman and Geoffrey Manne. “When platforms do it, it is often done to fill gaps in a platform’s marketplace, or provide a service that makes users’ lives easier, like Google putting Maps and Shopping results on relevant Search results pages. Objections to self-preferencing usually rest on self-preferencing’s harm to competitors, but competitors’ welfare is not a proxy for consumer welfare.”

Consumers appreciate both the quality and low cost of private label goods as shown by Nielsen data.

4. It is easier than ever for consumers to access and move their data across digital services.

Leading tech services are building the Data Transfer Project, which will give consumers the ability to transfer their data across services. The group explains: “Data portability and interoperability are central to innovation. The DTP Partners believe that people should use products because they provide unique value and features. If a user wants to switch to another product or service because they think it is better, they should be able to do so as easily as possible. This concept of allowing users to choose products and services based on choice, rather than being locked in, helps drive innovation and facilitates competition.”

For nearly a decade, Google has made it easy for people to move their data to competing products. Digital Information World’s Arooj Ahmed explains: “With Google Takeout, Google brought data portability for the users, along with giving them complete control over their data information. So, this not only allowed the users to make swift transfers, this also gave them the ability to back their data up to multiple clouds or try a new service- as per their wish. As per Google’s reports in 2019, Takeout was used to export more than 200 billion files, with an average of over two million exports of files per month.”

5. Digital mapping is a fiercely competitive sector where new entrants are thriving.

Demands for more robust mapping technology are leading to an explosion of new competitors and investment in the space, describes VentureBeat’s Chris O’Brien. “[N]ew mapping companies are turning to artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing, among other things, to deliver far more complex geodata. This increasing diversity and competition is the catalyst behind a global mapping market that is growing more than 11% annually and is expected to be worth $8.76 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research.”

MapBox recently struck a technology partnership with BMW, allowing drivers to stream live maps in their vehicles. More from Inside Autonomous Vehicles: “Mapbox updates the map in the cloud, distributed across data centers around the globe. This allows the company to regenerate the global map with 2.3 billion road segments on a daily basis, conflating dozens of vendor sources and applying dynamic updates from sensor readings as corrections on top. Mapbox has 700 million monthly active users, creating a feedback cycle of data.”