Jun 11, 2019 • 30M

Your privacy is a product in a two-sided market

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Whitney McKnight
For citizens seeking deep mental roots, not lists of shallow instructions.
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vol. 1 issue 10

Donald Baker, former US Asst. Attorney General for Antitrust. Photo: Whitney Fishburn

Greetings,

Today Congress began an investigation into whether Big Data firms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are running afoul of US antitrust law.

Before determining if the companies are monopolies, legislators will need to determine whether current antitrust law is sufficient enough to manage how Big Data has changed the marketplace. It used to be that a “relevant market” was easily defined, usually by geography. That’s out the window with the global net.

But there are more personal issues at stake. Now that we know how much of ourselves — namely our personal data — has been used for very big profit by these colassal organizations, without our explicit understanding that is what was happening, it’s also crucial that our lawmakers have a fundamental understanding of what a two-sided market is and how when we participate we are not just customers, we supply a product. Our data, our privacy, our names…these are the products that data companies sell.

That should mean we have rights as suppliers as well as citizens.

And it’s our rights as citizens that have been under attack in a pernicious way. By focusing our attention on what is called “the consumer welfare standard”, which is meant to ensure we get our goods and services for the lowest possible price, we are lured into thinking that is always the end goal.

But as we now see with Big Data firms, who supply us “goods” — essentially access to the Internet generally and to the online market place specifically, we have traded our freedoms (privacy, data) for “free”.

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